It

‘I’d like to help you, son, but you’re too young to vote,’ a deep voice said.
‘Turn it off, Richie,’ Beverly said softly.
He reached for it, and then his hand froze. ‘Stay tuned for more of the Richie Tozier All-Dead Rock Show!’ the clown’s laughing, screaming voice cried over the finger-pops and guitar-chops of the Eddie Cochran tune. ‘Don’t touch that dial, keep it tuned to the rockpile, they’re gone from the charts but not from our hearts and you keep coming, come right along, come on everybody! We play aaaalll the hits down here! Aaallllll the hits! And if you don’t believe me, just listen to this morning’s graveyard-shift guest deejay, Georgie Denbrough! Tell em, Georgie!’
And suddenly Bill’s brother was wailing out of the radio.
‘You sent me out and It killed me! I thought It was in the cellar, Big Bill, I thought It was in the cellar but It was in the drain, It was in the drain and It killed me, you let It kill me, Big Bill, you let It —
Richie snapped the radio o ff so hard the knob spun away and hit the floormat.
‘Rock and roll in the sticks really sucks,’ he said. His voice was not quite steady. ‘Bev’s right, we’ll leave it off, what do you say?’
No one replied. Bill’s face was pale and still and thoughtful under the glow of the passing streetlamps, and when the thunder muttered again in the west they all heard it.
6
In the Barrens
Same old bridge.
Richie parked beside it and they got out and moved to the railing — s a m e o l d r a i l i n g — and looked down.
Same old Barrens.
It seemed untouched by the last twenty-seven years; to Bill the turnpike overpass, which was the only new feature, looked unreal, something as ephemeral as a matte painting or a rear-screen projection effect in a movie. Cruddy little trees and scrub bushes glimmered in the twining fog and Bill thought: I guess this is what we mean when we talk about the persistence of memory, this or something like this, something you see at the right time and from the right angle, image that kicks off emotion like a jet engine. You see it so clear that all the things which happened in between are gone. If desire is what closes the circle between world and want, then the circle has closed.
‘Cuh-Cuh-Come on,’ he said, and climbed over the railing. They followed him down the embankment in a scatter of scree and pebbles. When they reached the bottom Bill checked automatically for Silver and then laughed at himself. Silver was leaning against the wall of Mike’s garage. It seemed Silver had no pan to play in this at all, although that was strange, after the way it had turned up.
Tuh-Take us there,’ Bill told Ben.
Ben looked at him and Bill read the thought in his eyes — It’s been twenty-seven years, Bill, dream on — and then he nodded and headed into the undergrowth.
The path — their path — had long since grown over, and they had to force themselves through tangles of thornbushes, prickers, and wild hydrangea so fragrant it was cloying. Crickets sang somnolently all around them, and a few lightning –bugs, early arrivals at summer’s luscious party, poked at the dark. Bill supposed kids still played down here, but they had made their own runs and secret ways.
They came to the clearing where the clubhouse had been, but now there was no clearing here at all. Bushes and lackluster scrub pines had reclaimed it all.
‘Look,’ Ben whispered, and crossed the clearing (in their memories it was still here, simply overlaid with another of those matte paintings). He yanked at something. It was the mahogany door they had found on the edge of the dump, the one they had used to finish off the clubhouse roof. It had been cast aside here and looked as if it hadn’t been touched in a dozen years or more. Creepers were firmly entrenched across its dirty surface.
‘Leave it alone, Haystack,’ Richie murmured. ‘It’s old.’
‘Tuh-Tuh-Take us th-there,