Bill nodded. "I'll be f-f-first. Then Eh-Eddie. B-B-Ben. Bev. Stuh-han the M-M-Man. M-M-Mike. You luh-last, Rih-Richie. E-Everyone k-k-keep one h-h-hand on the shuh-houlder of the p-p-person in fruh-fruh-front of y-y-you. It's gonna be d-dark."

"You coming out?" Henry Bowers shrieked down at them.

"We're gonna come out somewhere," Richie muttered. "I guess."

They formed up like a procession of blindmen. Bill looked back once, confirming that each had a hand on the shoulder of the person ahead. Then, bending forward slightly against the rush of the current, Bill Denbrough led his friends into the dark where the boat he had made for his brother had gone almost a year before.

Chapter 20 THE CIRCLE CLOSES

1

TOM

Tom Rogan was having one fuck of a crazy dream. In it he was killing his father.

Part of his mind understood how crazy this was; his father had died when Tom was only in the third grade. Well... maybe "died" wasn't such a good word. Maybe "committed suicide" was actually the truth. Ralph Rogan had made himself a gin-and-lye cocktail. One for the road, you might say. Tom had been put in nominal charge of his brother and sisters, and then he began to receive "whuppins" if anything went wrong with them.

So he couldn't have killed his father... except there he was, in this frightening dream, holding what looked like a harmless handle of some sort to his father's neck... only it wasn't really harmless, was it? There was a button in the end of the handle, and if he pushed it a blade would pop out and go right through his father's neck. I'm not going to do anything like that, Daddy, don't worry, his dreaming mind thought just before his finger jammed down on the button and the blade popped out. His father's sleeping eyes opened and stared up at the ceiling; his father's mouth opened and a bloody gargling sound came out. Daddy, I didn't do it! his mind screamed. Someone else -

He struggled to wake up and couldn't. The best he could do (and it turned out to be not very good at all) was to fade into a new dream. In this one he was splashing and slogging his way down a long dark tunnel. His balls hurt and his face stung because it was crisscrossed with scratches. There were others with him, but he could only make out vague shapes. It didn't matter, anyway. What mattered were the kids somewhere up ahead. They needed to pay. They needed

(a whuppin)

to be punished.

Whatever purgatory this was, it was a smelly one. Water dripped and echoed. His shoes and pants were soaked. The little shitpots were somewhere up ahead in this maze of tunnels, and perhaps they thought

(Henry)

Tom and his friends would get lost, but the joke was on them

(ha-ha all over you!)

because he had another friend, oh yes, a special friend, and this friend had marked the path they were to take with... with...

(Moon-Balloons)

thingamajigs that were big and round and somehow lighted from within so that they shed a glow like that which falls mysteriously from oldfashioned streetlamps. One of these balloons floated and drifted at each intersection, and on the side of each was an arrow, pointing the way into the tunnel-branch he and

(Belch and Victor)

his unseen friends were to take. And it was the right path, oh yes: he could hear the others ahead, their splashing progress echoing back, the distorted murmurs of their voices. They were getting closer, catching up. And when they did... Tom looked down and saw that he still had the switchknife in his hand.

For a moment he was frightened-this was like one of those crazy astral experiences he sometimes read about in the weekly tabloids, when your spirit left your body and entered someone else's. The shape of his body felt different to him, as if he were not Tom but

(Henry)

someone else, someone younger. He began to fight his way out of the dream, panicked, and then a voice was talking to him, a soothing voice, whispering in his ear: It doesn't matter when this is, and it doesn't matter who you are. What matters is that Beverly is up there, she's with them, my good friend, and do you know what? She's been doing something one hell of a lot worse than sneaking smokes. You know what? She's been fucking her old friend Bill Denbrough! Yes indeed! She and that stuttering freak, going right at it! They-

That's a lie! he tried to scream. She wouldn't dare!

But he knew it was no lie. She had used a belt on his

(kicked me in the)

balls and run off and she now had cheated on him, the slutty

(child)

little roundheels bitch had actually cheated on him, and oh dear friends, oh good neighbors, she was going to get the whuppin of all whuppins-first her and then Denbrough, her novel-writing friend. And anyone who tried to get in his way, you could count them in for a piece of the action, too.

He stepped up his pace, although the breath was already whistling in and out of his throat. Up ahead he could see another luminous circle bobbing in the darkness-another Moon-Balloon. He could hear the voices of the people ahead of him, and the fact that they were childish voices no longer bothered him. It was as the voice said: it didn't matter where, when or who. Beverly was up there, and oh dear friends, oh good neighbors -

'Come on, you guys, move your asses," he said, and it didn't even matter that his voice wasn't his own but the voice of a boy.

Then, as they approached the Moon-Balloon, he looked around and saw his companions for the first time. Both of them were dead. One was headless. The face of the other had been split open, as if by a great talon.

"We're moving as fast as we can, Henry," the boy with the split face said, and his lips moved in two pieces, grotesquely out of sync with each other, and that was when Tom shrieked the dream to pieces and came back to himself, tottering on the brink of what felt like some great empty space.

He struggled to keep his balance, lost it, and tumbled to the floor. The floor was carpeted but the fall still sent a sickening burst of pain through his hurt knee and he Stifled another cry against his forearm.

Where am I? Where the fuck am I?

He became aware of a faint but clear white light, and for a frightening moment he thought he was back in the dream again, that it was light cast by one of those crazy balloons. Then he remembered leaving the bathroom door partially open and the fluorescent light in there on. He always left the light on when staying in a strange place; it saved you barking your shins if you had to get up in the night to pee.

That clicked reality into place. It had been a dream, all some crazy dream. He was in a Holiday Inn. This was Derry, Maine. He had chased his wife here, and, in the middle of a crazy nightmare, he had fallen out of bed. That was all; that was the long and the short of it.

That wasn't just a nightmare.

He jumped as if the words had been spoken beside his ear instead of inside his own mind. It didn't seem like his own interior voice at all-it was cold, alien... but somehow hypnotic and believable.

He got up slowly, fumbled a glass of water off the table beside the bed, and drank it down. He ran shaky hands through his hair. The clock on the table said ten past three.

Go back to sleep. Wait until morning.

That alien voice answered: But there will be people around in the morning-too many people. And besides, you can beat them down there this time. This time you can be first.

Down there? He thought of his dream: the water, the dripping dark.

The light suddenly seemed brighter. He turned his head, not wanting to but helpless to stop. A groan slipped out of his mouth. A balloon was tied to the knob of the bathroom door. It floated at the end of a string about three feet long. The balloon glowed, full of a ghostly white light; it looked like a will-o-the-wisp glimpsed in a swamp, floating dreamily between trees overhung with gray ropes of moss. An arrow was printed on the balloon's gently bulging skin, an arrow that was blood-scarlet.

It was pointing at the door leading out into the hall.

It doesn't really matter who I am, the voice said soothingly, and Tom realized now that it wasn't coming from either his own head or from beside his ear; it was coming from the balloon, from the center of that strange lovely white light. All that matters is that I am going to see that everything turns out to your satisfaction, Tom. I want to see her take a whuppin; I want to see them all take a whuppin. They've crossed my path once too often... and much too late in the day for them. So listen, Tom. Listen very carefully. All together now... follow the bouncing ball...

Tom listened. The voice from the balloon explained.

It explained everything.

When it was done, it popped in one final flash of light and Tom began to dress.

2

AUDRA

Audra also had nightmares.

She awoke with a start, sitting bolt-upright in bed, the sheet pulled around her waist, her small breasts moving with her quick, agitated breathing.

Like Tom's, her dreaming had been a jumbled, distressful experience. Like Tom, she had had the sensation of being someone else-or rather, of having her own consciousness deposited (and partially submerged) in another body and another mind. She had been in a dark place with a number of others around her, and she had been aware of an oppressive sensation of danger-they were going into the danger deliberately and she wanted to scream at them to stop, to explain to her what was happening... but the person with whom she had merged seemed to know, and to believe it was necessary.

She was also aware that they were being chased, and that their pursuers were catching up, little by little.

Bill had been in the dream, but his story about how he had forgotten his childhood must have been on her mind, because in her dream Bill was only a boy, ten or twelve years old-he still had all his hair! She was holding his hand, and was dimly aware that she loved him very much, and that her willingness to go on was based on the rock-solid belief that Bill would protect her and all of them, that Bill, Big Bill, would somehow bring them through this and back into the daylight again.

Oh but she was so terrified.

They came to a branching of many tunnels and Bill stood there, looking from one to the next, and one of the others-a boy with his arm in a cast which glimmered a ghostly-white in the darkness-spoke up: That one, Bill. The bottom one."

"Y-Y-You're s-s-sure?"

"Yes."

And so they had gone that way and then there had been a door, a wee wooden door no more than three feet high, the sort of door you might see in a fairytale book, and there had been a mark on the door. She could not remember what that mark had been, what strange rune or symbol. But it had brought all her terror to a focusing-point and she had yanked herself out of that other body, that girl's body, whoever

(Beverly-Beverly)

she might have been. She awoke bolt-upright in a strange bed, sweaty, wide-eyed, gasping as if she had just run a race. Her hands flew to her legs, half-expecting to find them wet and cold with the water she had been walking through in her head. But she was dry.

Disorientation followed-this was not their home in Topanga Canyon or the rented house in Fleet. It was noplace-limbo furnished with a bed, a dresser, two chairs, and a TV.

"Oh God, come on, Audra-"

She scrubbed her hands viciously across her face and that sickening feeling of mental vertigo receded. She was in Derry. Derry, Maine, where her husband had grown through a childhood he claimed no longer to remember. Not a familiar place to her, or a particularly good place by its feel, but at least a known place. She was here because Bill was here, and she would see him tomorrow, at the Derry Town House. Whatever terrible thing was wrong here, whatever those new scars on his hands meant, they would face it together. She would call him, tell him she was here, then join him. After that... well...

Actually, she had no idea what came after that. The vertigo, that sense of being in a place that was really noplace, was threatening again. When she was nineteen she had done a whistle-stop tour with a scraggy little production company, forty not-so-wonderful performances of Arsenic and Old Lace in forty not-so-wonderful towns and small cities. All of this in forty-seven not-so-wonderful days. They began at the Peabody Dinner Theater in Massachusetts and ended at Play It Again Sam in Sausalito. And somewhere in between, in some Midwestern town like Ames Iowa or Grand Isle Nebraska or maybe Jubilee North Dakota, she had awakened like this in the middle of the night, panicked by disorientation, unsure what town she was in, what day it was, or why she was wherever she was. Even her name seemed unreal to her.

That feeling was back now. Her bad dreams had carried over into her waking and she felt a nightmarish free-floating terror. The town seemed to have wrapped itself around her like a python. She could sense it, and the feelings it produced were not good. She found herself wishing that she had heeded Freddie's advice and stayed away.

Her mind fixed on Bill, grasping at the thought of him the way a drowning woman would grip at a spar, a life-preserver, anything that

(we all float down here, Audra)

floats.

A chill raced through her and she crisscrossed her arms across her naked breasts. She shivered and saw goosebumps ripple their way up her flesh. For a moment it seemed to her that a voice had spoken aloud, but inside her head. As if there was an alien presence in there.

Am I going crazy? God, is that it?

No, her mind responded. It's just disorientation... jet-lag... worry over your man. Nobody's talking inside your head. Nobody-

"We all float down here, Audra," a voice said from the bathroom. It was a real voice, real as houses. And sly. Sly and duty and evil. "You'll float, too." The voice uttered a fruity little giggle that dropped in pitch until it sounded like a clogged drain bubbling thickly. Audra cried out... then pressed her hands against her mouth.

I didn't hear that.

She said it out loud, daring the voice to contradict her. It didn't. The room was silent. Somewhere, far away, a train whistled in the night.

Suddenly she needed Bill so badly that waiting until daylight seemed impossible. She was in a standardized motel room exactly like the other thirty-nine units in the place, but suddenly it was too much. Everything. When you started hearing voices, it was just too much. Too creepy. She seemed to be slipping back into the nightmare she'd so lately escaped. She felt scared and terribly alone. It's worse than that, she thought. I feel dead. Her heart suddenly skipped two beats in her chest, making her gasp and utter a startled cough. She felt an instant of prison-panic, claustrophobia inside her own body, and wondered if all this terror didn't have a stupidly ordinary physical root after all: maybe she was going to have a heart attack. Or was already having one.

Her heart settled, but uneasily.

Audra turned on the light by the bed-table and looked at her watch. Twelve past three. He would be sleeping, but that didn't matter to her now-nothing mattered except hearing his voice. She wanted to finish the night with him. If Bill was beside her, her clockwork would fall in sync with his and settle down. The nightmares would stay away. He sold nightmares to others-that was his trade-but to her he had never given anything but peace. Outside that odd cold nut imbedded in his imagination, peace seemed to be all he was made for or meant for. She got the Yellow Pages, found the number for the Derry Town House, and dialed it.