It

'Audra,' he said, laughing with her. He helped her off Silver, leaned the bike against a handy brick wall, and embraced her. He kissed her forehead, her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth, her neck, her breasts.

She hugged him while he did it.

'Bill, what's been happening? I remember getting off the plane at Bangor, and I can't remember a thing after that. Are you all right?'

'Yes.'

'Am I?'

'Yes. Now.'

She pushed him away so she could look at him. 'Bill, are you still stuttering?'

'No,' Bill said, and kissed her. 'My stutter is gone.'

'For good?'

'Yes,' he said. 'I think this time it's gone for good.'

'Did you say something about rock and roll?'

'I don't know. Did I?'

'I love you,' she said.

He nodded and smiled. When he smiled he looked very young, bald head or not. 'I love you too,' he said. 'And what else counts?'

8

He awakens from this dream unable to remember exactly what it was, or much at all beyond the simple fact that he has dreamed about being a child again. He touches his wife's smooth back as she sleeps her warm sleep and dreams her own dreams; he thinks that it is good to be a child, but it is also good to be grownup and able to consider the mystery of childhood . . . its beliefs and desires. I will write about all of this one day, he thinks, and knows it's just a dawn thought, an after-dreaming thought. But it's nice to think so for awhile in the morning's clean silence, to think that childhood has its own sweet secrets and confirms mortality, and that mortality defines all courage and love. To think that what has looked forward must also look back, and that each life makes its own imitation of immortality: a wheel.

Or so Bill Denbrough sometimes thinks on those early mornings after dreaming, when he almost remembers his childhood, and the friends with whom he shared it.

The book was begun in Bangor, Maine,

on September 9th, 1981,

and completed in Bangor, Maine,

on December 28th, 1985.