It

He came to a narrow path which had been beaten down to the bare earth. Ben considered it for a moment, then shook his head a little. He crossed it and plunged into the undergrowth again. He moved more slowly now, pushing bushes aside rather than stampeding through them. He was still moving roughly parallel to the stream the other kids had been playing beside. Even through the intervening bushes and trees he could see it was much wider than the one into which he and Henry had fallen.

Here was another of those concrete cylinders, barely visible amid a snarl of blackberry creepers, humming quietly to itself. Beyond, an embankment dropped off to the stream, and here an old, gnarled elm tree leaned crookedly out over the water. Its roots, half-exposed by bank erosion, looked like a snarl of dirty hair.

Hoping there wouldn't be bugs or snakes but too tired and numbly frightened to really care, Ben had worked his way between the roots and into a shallow cave beneath. He leaned back. A root jabbed him like an angry finger. He shifted his position a little and it supported him quite nicely.

Here came Henry, Belch, and Victor. He had thought they might be fooled into following the path, but no such luck. They stood close by him for a moment — any closer and he could have reached out of his hiding place and touched them.

'Bet them little snotholes back there saw him,' Belch said.

'Well, let's go find out,' Henry replied, and they headed back the way they had come. A few moments later Ben heard him roar: 'What the fuck you kids doin here?'

There was some sort of reply, but Ben couldn't tell what it was: the kids were too far away, and this close the river — it was the Kenduskeag, of course — was too loud. But he thought the kid sounded scared. Ben could sympathize.

Then Victor Criss bellowed something Ben hadn't understood at alclass="underline" 'What a fuckin baby dam!'

Baby dam? Baby damn? Or maybe Victor had said what a damn bunch of babies and Ben had misheard him.

'Let's break it!' Belch proposed.

There were yells of protest followed by a scream of pain. Someone began to cry. Yes, Ben could sympathize. They hadn't been able to catch him (or at least not yet), but here was another bunch of little kids for them to take out their mad on.

'Sure, break it,' Henry said.

Splashes. Yells. Big moronic gusts of laughter from Belch and Victor. An agonized infuriated cry from one of the little kids.

'Don't gimme any of your shit, you stuttering little freak,' Henry Bowers said. 'I ain't takin no more shit from nobody today.'

There was a splintering crack. The sound of running water downstream grew louder and roared briefly before quieting to its former placid chuckle. Ben suddenly understood. Baby dam, yes, that was what Victor had said. The kids — two or three of them it had sounded like when he passed by — had been building a dam. Henry and his friends had just kicked it apart. Ben even thought he knew who one of the kids was. The only 'stuttering little freak' he knew from Derry School was Bill Denbrough, who was in the other fifth-grade classroom.

'You didn't have to do that!' a thin and fearful voice cried out, and Ben recognized that voice as well, although he could not immediately put a face with it. 'Why did you do that?'

'Because I felt like it, fucknuts!' Henry roared back. There was a meaty thud. It was followed by a scream of pain. The scream was followed by weeping.

'Shut up,' Victor said. 'Shut up that crying, kid, or I'll pull your ears down and tie em under your chin.'

The crying became a series of choked snuffles.

'We're going,' Henry said, 'but before we do, I want to know one thing. You seen a fat kid in the last ten minutes or so? Big fat kid all bloody and cut up?'

There was a reply too brief to be anything but no.

'You sure?' Belch asked. 'You better be, mushmouth.'

'I-I-I'm sh-sh-sure,' Bill Denbrough replied.

'Let's go,' Henry said. 'He probably waded acrost back that way.'

'Ta –ta, boys,' Victor Criss called. 'It was a real baby dam, believe me. You're better off without it.'

Splashing sounds. Belch's voice came again, but farther away now. Ben couldn't make out the words. In fact, he didn't want to make out the words. Closer by, the boy who had been crying now resumed. There were comforting noises from the other boy. Ben had decided there was just the two of them, Stuttering Bill and the weeper.

He half-sat, half-lay where he was, listening to the two boys by the river and the fading sounds of Henry and his dinosaur friends crashing toward the far side of the Barrens. Sunlight flicked at his eyes and made little coins of light on the tangled roots above and around him. It was dirty in here, but it was also cozy . . . safe. The sound of running water was soothing. Even the sound of the crying kid was sort of soothing. His aches and pains had faded to a dull throb, and the sound of the dinosaurs had faded out completely. He would wait awhile, just to be sure they weren't coming back, and then he would make tracks.

Ben could hear the throb of the drainage machinery coming through the earth — could even feel it: a low, steady vibration that went from the ground to the root he was leaning against and then into his back. He thought of the Morlocks again, of their naked flesh; he imagined it would smell like the dank and shitty air that had come up through the ventholes of that iron cap. He thought of their wells driven deep into the earth, wells with rusty ladders bolted to their sides. He dozed, and at some point his thoughts became a dream.

11

It wasn't Morlocks he dreamed of. He dreamed of the thing which had happened to him in January, the thing which he hadn't quite been able to tell his mother.

It had been the first day of school after the long Christmas break. Mrs Douglas had asked for a volunteer to stay after and help her count the books that had been turned in just before the vacation. Ben had raised his hand.

'Thank you, Ben,' Mrs Douglas had said, favoring him with a smile of such brilliance that it warmed him down to his toes. , 'Suckass,' Henry Bowers remarked under his breath.

It had been the sort of Maine winter day that is both the best and the worst: cloudless, eye –wateringly bright, but so cold it was a little frightening. To make the ten-degree temperature worse, there was a strong wind to give the cold a bitter cutting edge.

Ben counted books and called out numbers; Mrs Douglas wrote them down (not bothering to double –check his work even on a random basis, he was proud to note), and then they both carried the books down to the storage room through halls where radiators clanked dreamily. At first the school had been full of sounds: slamming locker doors, the clackety-clack of Mrs Thomas's typewriter in the office, the slightly off-key choral renditions of the glee club upstairs, the nervous thud-thud-thud of basketballs from the gym and the scrooch and thud of sneakers as players drove toward the baskets or cut turns on the polished wood floor.

Little by little these sounds ceased, until, as the last set of books was totted up (one short, but it hardly mattered, Mrs Douglas sighed — they were all holding together on a wing and a

prayer), the only sounds were the radiators, the faint whissh-whissh of Mr Fazio's broom as he pushed colored sawdust up the hall floor, and the howl of the wind outside.

Ben looked toward the book room's one narrow window and saw that the light was fading rapidly from the sky. It was four o'clock and dusk was at hand. Membranes of dry snow blew around the icy jungle gym and skirled between the teetertotters, which were frozen solidly into the ground. Only the thaws of April would break those bitter winter-welds. He saw no one at all on Jackson Street. He looked a moment longer, expecting a car to roll through the Jackson-Witcham intersection, but none did. Everyone in Derry save himself and Mrs Douglas might be dead or fled, at least from what he could see from here.

He looked toward her and saw, with a touch of real fright, that she was feeling almost exactly the same things he was feeling himself. He could tell by the look in her eyes. They were deep and thoughtful and far off, not the eyes of a schoolteacher in her forties but those of a child. Her hands were folded just below her breasts, as if in prayer.