REMEMBER THE CURFEW SEVEN O'CLOCK IN THE EVENING DERRY POLICE DEPARTMENT

Seeing the sign hanging from that café where you used to spend your afternoons after school, a chill ran down your spine and settled at the small of your back. People argued about how many there had been, but everyone agreed there were at least four since winter; five if you included George Denbrough (many believed the little Denbrough’s death might have been caused by a very strange accident). The first was definitely Betty Ripsom, found the day after Christmas at a construction site on Jackson Street. The thirteen-year-old girl was discovered mutilated and frozen in the muddy ground. That didn’t make it into the papers, nor was it something you learned from an adult —you had heard it in casual conversations. About three and a half months later, at the start of trout season, a fisherman by the creek thirty kilometers from Derry hooked something that turned out to be the hand, wrist, and first ten centimeters of a woman’s arm. His hook had snagged that horrible prize through the slack skin between the thumb and index finger. The state police found the rest of Cheryl Lamonica seventy meters downstream, tangled in a tree that had fallen into the river during the previous winter; only by sheer luck had the body not floated into the Penobscot River and out to sea with the spring thaw. Miss Lamonica was sixteen. She was from Derry, but she no longer attended school. Three years earlier, she had given birth to a daughter, Andrea. Her disappearance had been reported five weeks before her remains were found. The police investigation started with a logical assumption: she had been murdered by one of her "friends." She had many friends from the Bangor Air Force base. «Most of them were good boy» said Cheryl’s mother. One of those "good boys" was a forty-year-old colonel in the Air Force, with a wife and three kids back in New Mexico. Another was serving time at Shawshank for armed robbery. One of her friends, the police thought. Or maybe a stranger, a s3xua! maniac. If it was a s3xua! maniac, it seemed he had also taken an interest in boys! In late April, a high school teacher on a field trip spotted a pair of red sneakers and a blue corduroy garment sticking out of a storm drain on Merit Street. That part of Merit had been closed off and stripped of asphalt the previous fall, as the new highway extension to Bangor was planned to pass through there. The b0dy belonged to Matthew Clements, age three, who had been reported missing by his parents the day before. His photo appeared on the front page of the Derry News— a little boy with dark hair, smiling at the camera. The Clements family lived on Kansas Street, on the other side of town. His mother, so stunned she seemed trapped under a glass bell of absolute calm, told the police that Matty had been riding his tricycle up and down the sidewalk in front of their house, located at the corner of Kansas and Kossuth Lane. She had gone inside to switch the laundry into the dryer, and when she looked back out the window to check on Matty, he was gone. Only his tricycle remained, toppled on the grass between the sidewalk and the street. One of the back wheels was still lazily spinning. That was too much for Sheriff Borton. The next day, at a special council meeting, he proposed the curfew.

(It was terrible how the apparent murders were becoming a more casual, everyday topic) You shook your head slightly before leaving the shop with a bag of hot croissants, some filled with chocolate, others with jam, and a few with homemade whipped cream. You had been going to that bakery since you were just nine years old; now, at seventeen, you were completely loyal to the place. You walked calmly, a couple of blocks northwest of Derry, to the point of crashing from wandering in the depths of your mind.

“Watch where you're going, idiot,” spat out with disgust that twelve-year-old boy (in your eyes): Henry Bowers.

And he didn't come alone, as always, his cronies were with him: Vic and Belch.