It

on this, he could have sermonized: Not bad, he would begin. This is not bad at all. But there was something else he had to say first.
‘Richie,’ he whispered.
‘What?’ Richie was down on his hands and knees, staring at him desperately.
‘Don’t call me Eds,’ he said, and smiled. He raised his left hand slowly and touched Richie’s cheek. Richie was crying. ‘You know I . . . I . . . ‘ Eddie closed his eyes, thinking how to finish, and while he was still thinking it over he died.
6
Derry / 7:00 – 9:00 A.M.
By 7:00 A.M., the wind –speed in Derry had picked up to about thirty-seven miles an hour, with gusts up to forty-five. Harry Brooks, a National Weather Service forecaster based at Bangor International Airport, made an alarmed call to NWS headquarters in Augusta. The winds, he said, were coming out of the west and blowing in a queer semicircular pattern he had never seen before . . . but it looked to him more and more like some weird species of pocket hurricane, one that was limited almost exclusively to Derry Township. At 7:10, the major Bangor radio stations broadcast the first severe-weather warnings. The explosion of the power-transformer at Tracker Brothers’ had killed the power all over Derry on the Kansas Street side of the Barrens. At 7:17, a hoary old maple on the Old Cape side of the Barrens fell with a terrific rending crash, flattening a Nite-Owl store on the corner of Merit Street and Cape Avenue. An elderly patron named Raymond Fogarty was killed by a toppling beer cooler. This was the same Raymond Fogarty who, as the minister of the First Methodist Church of Derry, had presided over the burial rites of George Denbrough in October of 1957. The maple also pulled down enough power lines to knock out the power in both the Old Cape and the somewhat more fashionable Sherburn Woods development beyond it. The clock in the steeple of the Grace Baptist Church had chimed neither six nor seven. At 7:20, three minutes after the maple fell in the Old Cape and about an hour and fifteen minutes after every toilet and domestic drain over there had suddenly reversed itself, the clock in the tower chimed thirteen times. A minute later, a blue –white stroke of lightning struck the steeple. Heather Libby, the minister’s wife, happened to be looking out the window of the parsonage’s kitchen at the time, and she said that the steeple ‘exploded like someone loaded it up with dynamite.’ Whitewashed boards, chunks of beams, and clockwork from Switzerland showered down on the street. The ragged remains of the steeple burned briefly and then guttered out in the rain, which was now a tropical downpour. The streets leading downhill into the downtown shopping area foamed and ran. The progress of the Canal under Main Street had become a steady shaking thunder that made people look at each other uneasily. At 7:25, with the titanic crash of the Grace Baptist steeple still reverberating all over Derry, the janitor who came into Wally’s Spa every morning except Sunday to swamp the place out saw something which sent him screaming into the street. This fellow, who had been an alcoholic eve r since his first semester at the University of Maine to these eleven years ago, was paid a pittance for his services — his real pay, it was understood, was his absolute freedom to finish up anything left in the beer kegs under the bar from the night before. Richie Tozier might or might not have remembered him; he was Vincent Caruso Taliendo, better known to his fifth-grade contemporaries as ‘Boogers’ Taliendo. As he was mopping up on that apocalyptic
morning in Derry, working his way gradually closer and closer to the serving area, he saw all seven of the beer taps — three Bud, two Narragansett, one Schlitz (known more familiarly to the bleary patrons of Wally’s as Slits), and one Miller Lite — nod forward, as if pulled by seven invisible hands. Beer ran from them in streams of gold –white foam. Vince started forward, thinking not of ghosts or phantoms but of his morning’s dividend going down the drain. Then he skidded to a stop, eyes widening, and a wailing, horrified scream rose in the empty, beer-smelling cave that was Wally’s Spa. Beer had given way to arterial streams of blood. It swirled in the chromium drains, overflowed, and ran down the side of the bar in little streamlets. Now hair and chunks of flesh began to splurt out of the beer-taps. ‘Boogers’ Taliendo watched this, transfixed, not even able to summon enough strength to scream again. Then there was a thudding, toneless blast as one of the beer kegs under the counter exploded. All of the cupboard doors under the bar swung wide. Greenish smoke, like the aftermath of a magician’s