It

Victorian structure.
‘What a d-d-day,’ Bill said glumly. There were dark purplish patches under his eyes. His face looked white and used. ‘You better call your house when w-we get to muh-mine. So your f-folks don’t go b-b-bananas.’
‘Yeah. You bet. Listen, Bill — ‘
Richie paused for a moment, thinking about Ben’s mummy, Eddie’s leper, and whatever Stan had almost told them. For a moment something swam in his own mind, something about that Paul Bunyan statue out by the City Center. But that had only been a dream, for God’s sake.
He pushed away such irrelevant thoughts and plunged.
‘Let’s go up to your house, what do you say? Take a look in Georgie’s room. I want to see that picture.’
Bill looked at Richie, shocked. He tried to speak but could not; h is stress was simply too great. He settled for shaking his head violently.
Richie said, ‘You heard Eddie’s story. And Ben’s. Do you believe what they said?’
‘I don’t nuh-nuh –know. I th-hink they m-m-must have sub –seen suh-homething.’
‘Yeah. Me too. All the kids that’ve been killed around here, I think all of them would have had stories to tell, too. The only difference between Ben and Eddie and those other kids is that Ben and Eddie didn’t get caught.’
Bill raised his eyebrows but showed no great surprise. Richie had supposed Bill would have taken it that far himself. He couldn’t talk so good, but he was no dummy.
‘So now dig on this awhile, Big Bill,’ Richie said. ‘A guy could dress up in a clown suit and kill kids. I don’t know why he’d want to, but nobody can tell why crazy people do things, right?’
‘Ruh-Ruh-Ruh — ‘
‘Right. It’s not that much different than the Joker in a Batman funnybook.’ Just hearing his ideas out loud excited Richie. He wondered briefly if he was actually trying to prove something or just throwing up a smokescreen of words so he could see that room, that picture. In the end it probably didn’t matter. In the end maybe just seeing Bill’s eyes light up with their own excitement was enough.
‘B-B-But wh-wh-wher e does the pih –hicture fit i-i-in?’
‘What do you think, Billy?’
In a low voice, not looking at Richie, Bill said he didn’t think it had anything to do with the murders. ‘I think it was Juh-Juh –Georgie’s g-ghost.’
‘A ghost in a picture?’ Bill no dded.
Richie thought about it. The idea of ghosts gave his child’s mind no trouble at all. He was sure there were such things. His parents were Methodists, and Richie went to church every Sunday and to Thursday-night Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings as well. He knew a great deal of the Bible already, and he knew the Bible believed in all sorts of weird stuff. According to the Bible, God Himself was at least one –third Ghost, and that was just the beginning. You could tell the Bible believed in demons, because Jesus threw a bunch of them out of this guy. Real chuckalicious ones, too. When Jesus asked the guy who had them what his name was, the demons answered and told Him to go join the Foreign Legion. Or
something like that. The Bible believed in witches, or else why would it say ‘Thou shall not suffer a witch to live’? Some of the stuff in the Bible was even better than the stuff in the horror comics. People getting boiled in oil or hanging themselves like Judas Iscariot; the story about how wicked King Ahaz fell off the tower and all the dogs came and licked up his blood; the mass baby-murders that had accompanied the births of both Moses and Jesus Christ; guys who came out of their graves or flew into the air; soldiers who witched down walls; prophets who saw the future and fought monsters. All of that was in the Bible and every word of it was true — so said Reverend Craig and so said Richie’s folks and so said Richie. He was perfectly willing to credit the possibility of Bill’s explanation; it was the logic which troubled him.
‘But you said you were scared. Why would George’s ghost want to scare you, Bill?’
Bill put a hand to his mouth and wiped it. The hand was trembling slightly. ‘H-He’s probably muh-muh-mad at m-m-me. For g-getting him kin –hilled. It was my fuh-fuh –fault. I s-sent him out with the buh-buh-buh — ‘ He was incapable of getting the word out, so he rocked his hand in the air instead. Richie nodded to show he understood what Bill meant . . . but not to indicate agreement.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘If you stabbed him in the back or shot him, that would be different. Or even if you, like, gave him a loaded gun that belonged to your dad to play with and he shot himself with it. But it wasn’t a gun, it was just a boat. You didn’t want to hurt him; in fact’ — Richie raised one finger and waggled it at Bill in a lawyerly way — ‘you just wanted the kid to have a little fun, right?’
Bill thought