It

tattered hole where the left arm had been. A knob of bone, horribly bright, peeked through the torn cloth.
The boy’s eyes stared up into the white sky, and as Dave staggered away toward the others already running pell –mell down the street, they began to fill up with rain.
4
Somewhere below, in the stormdrain that was already filled nearly to capacity with runoff (there could have been no one down there, the County Sheriff would later exclaim to a Der ry News reporter with a frustrated fury so great it was almost agony; Hercules himself would have been swept away in that driving current), George’s newspaper boat shot onward through nighted chambers and long concrete hallways that roared and chimed with water. For awhile it ran neck-and –neck with a dead chicken that floated with its yellowy, reptilian toes pointed at the dripping ceiling; then, at some junction east of town, the chicken was swept off to the left while George’s boat went straight.
An hour later, while George’s mother was being sedated in the Emergency Room at Derry Home Hospital and while Stuttering Bill sat stunned and white and silent in his bed, listening to his father sob hoarsely in the parlor where his mother had been playing Für Elise when George went out, the boat shot out through a concrete loophole like a bullet exiting the muzzle of a gun and ran at speed down a sluiceway and into an unnamed stream. When it joined the boiling, swollen Penobscot River twenty minutes later, the first rifts of blue had begun to show in the sky overhead. The storm was over.
The boat dipped and swayed and sometimes took on water, but it did not sink; the two brothers had waterproofed it well. I do not know where it finally fetched up, if ever it did; perhaps it reached the sea and sails there forever, like a magic boat in a fairytale. All I know is that it was still afloat and still running on the breast of the flood when it passed the incorporated town limits of Derry, Maine, and there it passes out of this tale forever.

1
The reason Adrian was wearing the hat, his sobbing boyfriend would later tell the police, was because he had won it at the Pitch Til U Win stall on the Bassey Park fairgrounds jus t six days before his death. He was proud of it.
‘He was wearing it because he loved this shitty little town!’ the boyfriend, Don Hagarty, screamed at the cops.
‘Now, now — there’s no need for that sort of language,’ Officer Harold Gardener told Hagarty. Harold Gardener was one of Dave Gardener’s our sons. On the day his father had discovered the lifeless, one-armed body of George Denbrough, Harold Gardener had been five. On this day, almost twenty-seven years later, he was thirty-two and balding. Harold Gardener recognized the reality of Don Hagarty’s grief and pain, and at the same time found it impossible to take seriously. This man — if you want to call him a man — was wearing lipstick and satin pants so tight you could almost read the wrinkles ni his cock. Grief or no grief, pain or no pain, he was, after all, just a queer. Like his friend, the late Adrian Mellon.
‘Let’s go through it again,’ Harold’s partner, Jeffrey Reeves, said. ‘The two of you came out of the Falcon and turned toward the Canal. Then what?’
‘How many times do I have to tell you idiots?’ Hagarty was still screaming. ‘They killed him! They pushed him over the side! Just another day in Macho City for them!’ Don Hagarty began to cry.
‘One more time,’ Reeves repeated patiently. ‘You came out of the Falcon. Then what?’
2
In an interrogation room just down the hall, two Derry cops were speaking with Steve Dubay, seventeen; in the Clerk of Probate’s office upstairs, two more were questioning John ‘Webby’ Garton, eighteen; and in the Chief of Police’s office on the fifth floor, Chief Andrew Rademacher and Assistant District Attorney Tom Boutillier were questioning fifteen-year-old C h r i s topher Unwin. Unwin, who wore faded jeans, a grease– smeared tee– shirt, and blocky engine er boots, was weeping. Rademacher and Boutillier had taken him because they had quite accurately assessed him as the weak link in the chain.
‘Let’s go through it again,’ Boutillier said in this office just as Jeffrey Reeves was saying the same thing two floors down.
‘We didn’t mean to kill him,’ Unwin blubbered. ‘It was the hat. We couldn’t believe he was still wearing the hat after, you know, after what Webby said the first time. And I guess we wanted to scare him.’
‘For what he said,’ Chief Rademacher interjected.
‘Yes.’
‘To John Garton, on