She went off into another screamy gale of laughter, and Rich closed his eyes. He could feel the beginnings of a headache.

'Be a dear and see what you can do, would you?' he asked, still being W. C. Fields, and hung up on her laughter.

Now he had to go back to being himself, and that was hard — it got harder to do that every year. It was easier to be brave when you were someone else.

He was trying to pick out a pair of good loafers and had about decided to stick with sneakers when the phone rang again. It was Carol Feeny, back in record time. He felt an instant urge to fall into the Buford Kissdrivel Voice and fought it off. She had been able to get him a first-class seat on the American Airlines red-eye nonstop from LAX to Boston. He would leave LA at 9:03 P.M. and arrive at Logan about five o'clock tomorrow morning. Delta would fly him out of Boston at 7:30 A.M. and into Bangor, Maine, at 8:20. She had gotten him a full –sized sedan from Avis, and it was only twenty –six miles from the Avis counter at Bangor International Airport to the Derry town line.

Only twenty-six miles? Rich thought. Is that all, Carol? Well, maybe it is — in miles, anyway. But you don't have the slightest idea how far it really is to Derry, and I don't, either. But oh God, oh dear God, I am going to find out.

'I didn't try for a room because you didn't tell me how long you'd be there,' she said. 'Do you — '

'No — let me take care of that,' Rich said, and then Buford Kissdrivel took over. 'You've been a peach, my deah. A Jawja peach, a cawse.'

He hung up gently on her — always leave em laughing — and then dialed 207-555-1212 for State of Maine Directory Assistance. He wanted a number for the Derry Town House. God, there was a name from the past. He hadn't thought of the Derry Town House in — what? — te n years? twenty? twenty-five years, even? Crazy as it seemed, he guessed it had been at least twenty-five years, and if Mike hadn't called, he supposed he might never have thought of it again in his life. And yet there had been a time in his life when he had walked past that great red brick 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.

A cigarette, just one. Even a Carlton would do, for Christ's sweet sake.

Gonna getcha, four-eyes! Gonna make you EAT that fuckin bookbag!

Town House,' a male voice with a Yankee tang said; it had travelled all the way across New England, the Midwest, and under the casinos of Las Vegas to reach his ear.

Rich asked the voice if he could reserve a suite of rooms at the Town House, beginning tomorrow. The voice told him he could, and then asked him for how long.

'I can't say. I've got — ' He paused briefly, minutely.

What did he have, exactly? In his mind's eye he saw a boy with a tartan bookbag running from the tough guys; he saw a boy who wore glasses, a thin boy with a pale face that had somehow seemed to scream Hit me! Go on and hit me! in some mysterious way to every passing bully. Here's my lips! Mash them back against my teeth! Here's my nose! Bloody it for sure and break it if you can! Box an ear so it swells up like a cauliflower! Split an eyebrow! Here's my chin, go for the knockout button! Here are my eyes, so blue and so magnified behind these hateful, hateful glasses, these horn-rimmed specs one bow of which is held on with adhesive tape. Break the specs! Drive a shard of glass into one of these eyes and close it forever! What the hell!

He closed his eyes and said: 'I've got business in Derry, you see. I don't know how long the transaction will take. How about three days, with an option to renew?'

'An option to renew?' the desk-clerk asked doubtfully, and Rich waited patiently for the fellow to work it over in his mind. 'Oh, I get you! That's very good!'

'Thank you, and I . . . ah . . . hope you can vote for us in Novembah,' John F. Kennedy said. 'Jackie wants to . . . ah . . . do ovuh the ah . . . Oval Office, and I've got a job all lined up for my . . . ah . . . brothah Bobby.'