It

pile every day — and on more than one occasion he had run past it, with Henry Bowers and Belch Huggins and that other big boy, Victor Somebody-or-Other, in hot pursuit, all of them yelling little pleasantries like We’re gonna getcha, fuckface! Gonnagetcha, you little smartass! Gonna getcha, you foureyed faggot! Had they ever gotten him?
Before Rich could remember, an operator was asking him what city, please.
‘In Derry, operator — ‘
Derry! God! Even the word felt strange and forgotten in his mouth; saying it was like kissing an antique.
‘ — do you have a number for the Derry Town House?’
‘One moment, sir.’
No way. It’ll be gone. Razed in an urban-renewal program. Changed into an Elks’ Hall or a Bowl-a-Drome or an Electric Dreamscape Video Arcade. Or maybe burned down one night when the odds finally ran out on some drunk shoe salesman smoking in bed. All gone, Richie
— just like the glasses Henry Bowers always used to rag you about. What’s that Springsteen
song say? Glory days . . . gone in the wink of a young girl’s eye. What young girl? Why, Bev,
of course. Bev . . .
Changed the Town House might be, but gone it apparently was not, because a blank, robotic voice now came on the line and said: ‘The . . . number . . . is . . . 9 . . . 4 . . . 1 . . . 8 . . . 2 . . . 8 . . . 2. Repeat: . . . the . . . number . . . is . . . ‘
But Rich had gotten it the first time. It was a pleasure to hang up on that droning voice — it was too easy to imagine some great globular Directory Assistance monster buried somewhere in the earth, sweating rivets and holding thousands of telephones in thousands of jointed chromium tentacles — the Ma Bell version of Spidey’s nemesis, Dr Octopus. Each year the world Rich lived in felt more and more like a huge electronic haunted house in which digital ghosts and frightened human beings lived in uneasy coexistence.
Still standing. To paraphrase Paul Simon, still standing after all these years.
He dialed the hotel he had last seen through the horn-rimmed spectacles of his childhood. Dialing that number, 1-207-941-8282, was fatally easy. He held the telephone to his ear, looking out his study’s wide picture window. The surfers were gone; a couple were walking slowly up the beach, hand in hand, where they had been. The couple could have been a poster on the wall of the travel agency where Carol Feeny worked, that was how perfect they were. Except, that was, for the fact they were both wearing glasses.
Gonna getcha, fuckface! Gonna break your glasses!
Criss, his mind sent up abruptly. His last name was Criss. Victor Criss.
Oh Christ, that was nothing he wanted to know, not at this late date, but it didn’t seem to matter in the slightest. Something was happening down there in the vaults, down there where Rich Tozier kept his own personal collection of Golden Oldies. Doors were opening.
Only they’re not records down there, are they? Down there you’re not Rich ‘Records’ Tozier, hot-shot KLAD deejay and the Man of a Thousand Voices, are you? And those things that are opening . . . they aren’t exactly doors, are they?
He tried to shake these thoughts off.
Thing to remember is that I’m okay. I’m okay, you’re okay, Rich Tozier’s okay. Could use a cigarette, is all.
He had quit four years ago but he could use one now, all right.
They’re not records but dead bodies. You buried them deep but now there’s some kind of crazy earthquake going on and the ground is spitting them up to the surface. You’re not Rich ‘Records’ Tozier down there; down there you’re just Richie ‘Four-Eyes’ Tozier and you’re with your buddies and you’re so scared it feels like your balls are turning into Welch’s grape jelly. Those aren’t doors, and they’re not opening. Those are crypts, Richie. They’re cracking open and the vampires you thought were dead are all flying out again.