It

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 pinealo w,’ 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.’
3
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 explainin g 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