It, Page 5

  The clown, Hagarty said, looked like a cross between Ronald McDonald and that old TV clown, Bozo--or so he thought at first. It was the wild tufts of orange hair that brought such comparisons to mind. But later consideration had caused him to think the clown really looked like neither. The smile painted over the white pancake was red, not orange, and the eyes were a weird shiny silver. Contact lenses, perhaps . . . but a part of him thought then and continued to think that maybe that silver had been the real color of those eyes. He wore a baggy suit with big orange-pompom buttons; on his hands were cartoon gloves.

  "If you need help, Don," the clown said, "help yourself to a balloon."

  And it offered the bunch it held in one hand.

  "They float," the clown said. "Down here we all float; pretty soon your friend will float, too."

  12

  "This clown called you by name," Jeff Reeves said in a totally expressionless voice. He looked over Hagarty's bent head at Harold Gardener, and one eye drew down in a wink.

  "Yes," Hagarty said, not looking up. "I know how it sounds."

  13

  "So then you threw him over," Boutillier said. "Bum's rush."

  "Not me!" Unwin said, looking up. He flicked the hair out of his eyes with one hand and stared at them urgently. "When I saw they really meant to do it, I tried to pull Steve away, because I knew the guy might get banged up.... It was like ten feet to the water...."

  It was twenty-three. One of Chief Rademacher's patrolmen had already measured.

  "But it was like he was crazy. The two of them kept yelling 'Bum's rush! Bum's rush!' and they picked him up. Webby had him under the arms and Steve had him by the seat of the pants, and . . . and . . ."

  14

  When Hagarty saw what they were doing, he rushed back toward them, screaming "No! No! No!" at the top of his voice.

  Chris Unwin pushed him backward and Hagarty landed in a teeth-rattling heap on the sidewalk. "Do you want to go over, too?" he whispered. "You run, baby!"

  They threw Adrian Mellon over the bridge and into the water then. Hagarty heard the splash.

  "Let's get out of here," Steve Dubay said. He and Webby were backing toward the car.

  Chris Unwin went to the railing and looked over. He saw Hagarty first, sliding and clawing his way down the weedy, trash-littered embankment to the water. Then he saw the clown. The clown was dragging Adrian out on the far side with one arm; its balloons were in its other hand. Adrian was dripping wet, choking, moaning. The clown twisted its head and grinned up at Chris. Chris said he saw its shining silver eyes and its bared teeth--great big teeth, he said.

  "Like the lion in the circus, man," he said. "I mean, they were that big."

  Then, he said, he saw the clown shove one of Adrian Mellon's arms back so it lay over his head.

  "Then what, Chris?" Boutillier said. He was bored with this part. Fairytales had bored him since the age of eight on.

  "I dunno," Chris said. "That was when Steve grabbed me and hauled me into the car. But ... I think it bit into his armpit." He looked up at them again, uncertain now. "I think that's what it did. Bit into his armpit.

  "Like it wanted to eat him, man. Like it wanted to eat his heart."

  15

  No, Hagarty said when he was presented with Chris Unwin's story in the form of questions. The clown did not drag Ade up on the far bank, at least not that he saw--and he would grant that he had been something less than a disinterested observer by that point; by that point he had been out of his fucking mind.

  The clown, he said, was standing near the far bank with Adrian's dripping body clutched in its arms. Ade's right arm was stuck stiffly out behind the clown's head, and the clown's face was indeed in Ade's right armpit, but it was not biting: it was smiling. Hagarty could see it looking out from beneath Ade's arm and smiling.

  The clown's arms tightened, and Hagarty heard ribs splinter.

  Ade shrieked.

  "Float with us, Don," the clown said out of its grinning red mouth, and then pointed with one of its white-gloved hands under the bridge.

  Balloons floated against the underside of the bridge--not a dozen or a dozen dozens but thousands, red and blue and green and yellow, and printed on the side of each was IDERRY!

  16

  "Well now, that surely does sound like a lot of balloons," Reeves said, and tipped Harold Gardener another wink.

  "I know how it sounds," Hagarty reiterated in the same dreary voice.

  "You saw those balloons," Gardener said.

  Don Hagarty slowly held his hands up in front of his face. "I saw them as clearly as I can see my own fingers at this moment. Thousands of them. You couldn't even see the underside of the bridge--there were too many of them. They were rippling a little, and sort of bouncing up and down. There was a sound. A funny low squealing noise. That was their sides rubbing together. And strings. There was a forest of white strings hanging down. They looked like white strands of spiderweb. The clown took Ade under there. I could see its suit brushing through those strings. Ade was making awful choking sounds. I started after him ... and the clown looked back. I saw its eyes, and all at once I understood who it was." "Who was it, Don?" Harold Gardener asked softly.

  "It was Derry," Don Hagarty said. "It was this town."

  "And what did you do then?" It was Reeves.

  "I ran, you dumb shit," Hagarty said, and burst into tears.

  17

  Harold Gardener kept his peace until November 13th, the day before John Garton and Steven Dubay were to go on trial in Derry District Court for the murder of Adrian Mellon. Then he went to see Tom Boutillier. He wanted to talk about the clown. Boutillier didn't--but when he saw Gardener might do something stupid without a little guidance, he did.

  "There was no clown, Harold. The only clowns out that night were those three kids. You know that as well as I do."

  "We have two witnesses--"

  "Oh, that's crap. Unwin decided to bring on the One-Armed Man, as in 'We didn't kill the poor little faggot, it was the one-armed man,' as soon as he understood he'd really gotten his buns into some hot water this time. Hagarty was hysterical. He stood by and watched those kids murder his best friend. It wouldn't have surprised me if he'd seen flying saucers."

  But Boutillier knew better. Gardener could see it in his eyes, and the Assistant D.A.'s ducking and dodging irritated him.

  "Come on," he said. "We're talking about independent witnesses here. Don't bullshit me."

  "Oh, you want to talk bullshit? Are you telling me you believe there was a vampire clown under the Main Street Bridge? Because that's my idea of bullshit."

  "No, not exactly, but--"

  "Or that Hagarty saw a billion balloons under there, each imprinted with exactly the same thing as what was written on his lover's hat? Because that is also my idea of bullshit."

  "No, but--"

  "Then why are you bothering with this?"

  "Stop cross-examining me!" Gardener roared. "They both described it the same and neither knew what the other one was saying!"

  Boutillier had been sitting at his desk, playing with a pencil. Now he put the pencil down, got up, and walked over to Harold Gardener. Boutillier was five inches shorter, but Gardener retreated a step before the man's anger.

  "Do you want us to lose this case, Harold?"

  "No. Of course n--"

  "Do you want those running sores to walk free?"

  "No!"

  "Okay. Good. Since we both agree on the basics, I'll tell you exactly what I think. Yes, there was probably a man under the bridge that night. Maybe he was even wearing a clown suit, although I've dealt with enough witnesses to guess maybe it was just a stewbum or a transient wearing a bunch of cast-off clothes. I think he was probably down there scrounging for dropped change or roadmeat--half a burger someone chucked over the side, or maybe the crumbs from the bottom of a Frito bag. Their eyes did the rest, Harold. Now is that possible?"

  "I don't know," Harold said. He wanted to be convin
ced, but given the exact tally of the two descriptions ... no. He didn't think it was possible.

  "Here's the bottom line. I don't care if it was Kinko the Klown or a guy in an Uncle Sam suit on stilts or Hubert the Happy Homo. If we introduce this fellow into the case, their lawyer is going to be on it before you can say 'Jack Robin-son.' He's going to say those two little innocent lambs out there with their fresh haircuts and new suits didn't do anything but toss that gay fellow Mellon over the side of the bridge for a joke. He'll point out that Mellon was still alive after he took the fall; they have Hagarty's testimony as well as Unwin's for that.

  "His clients didn't commit murder, oh no! It was a psycho in a clown suit. If we introduce this, that's going to happen and you know it."

  "Unwin's going to tell that story anyhow."

  "But Hagarty isn't," Boutillier said. "Because he understands. Without Hagarty, who's going to believe Unwin?"

  "Well, there's us," Harold Gardener said with a bitterness that surprised even himself, "but I guess we're not telling."

  "Oh, give me a break!" Boutillier roared, throwing up his hands. "They killed him! They didn't just throw him over the side--Garton had a switchblade. Mellon was stabbed seven times, including once in the left lung and twice in the testicles. The wounds match the blade. Four of his ribs were broken--Dubay did that, bear-hugging him. He was bitten, all right. There were bites on his arms, his left cheek, his neck. I think that was Unwin and Garton, although we've only got one clear match, and that one's probably not clear enough to stand up in court. And so all right, there was a big chunk of meat gone from his right armpit, so what? One of them really liked to bite. Probably even got himself a pretty good bone-on while he was doing it. I'm betting Garton, although we'll never prove it. And Mellon's earlobe was gone."

  Boutillier stopped, glaring at Harold.

  "If we let in this clown story we'll never bring it home to them. Do you want that?"

  "No, I told you."

  "The guy was a fruit, but he wasn't hurting anyone," Boutillier said. "So hi-ho-the-dairy-o, along come these three pusholes in their engineer boots and they steal his life. I'm going to put them in the slam, my friend, and if I hear they got their puckery little assholes cored down there at Thomaston, I'm gonna send them cards saying I hope whoever did it had AIDS."

  Very fiery, Gardener thought. And the convictions will also look very good on your record when you run for the top spot in two years.

  But he left without saying more, because he also wanted to see them put away.

  18

  John Webber Garton was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to ten to twenty years in Thomaston State Prison.

  Steven Bishoff Dubay was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to fifteen years in Shawshank State Prison.

  Christopher Philip Unwin was tried separately as a juvenile and convicted of second-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced to six months at the South Windham Boys' Training Facility, sentence suspended.

  At the time of this writing, all three sentences are under appeal; Garton and Dubay may be seen on any given day girl-watching or playing Penny Pitch in Bassey Park, not far from where Mellon's torn body was found floating against one of the pilings of the Main Street Bridge.

  Don Hagarty and Chris Unwin have left town.

  At the major trial--that of Garton and Dubay--no one mentioned a clown.

  CHAPTER 3

  Six Phone Calls (1985)

  1

  Stanley Uris Takes a Bath

  Patricia Uris later told her mother she should have known something was wrong. She should have known it, she said, because Stanley never took baths in the early evening. He showered early each morning and sometimes soaked late at night (with a magazine in one hand and a cold beer in the other), but baths at 7:00 P.M. were not his style.

  And then there was the thing about the books. It should have delighted him; instead, in some obscure way she did not understand, it seemed to have upset and depressed him. About three months before that terrible night, Stanley had discovered that a childhood friend of his had turned out to be a writer--not a real writer, Patricia told her mother, but a novelist. The name on the books was William Denbrough, but Stanley had sometimes called him Stuttering Bill. He had worked his way through almost all of the man's books; had, in fact, been reading the last on the night of the bath--the night of May 28th, 1985. Patty herself had picked up one of the earlier ones, out of curiosity. She had put it down after just three chapters.

  It had not just been a novel, she told her mother later; it had been a horrorbook. She said it just that way, all one word, the way she would have said sexbook. Patty was a sweet, kind woman, but not terribly articulate--she had wanted to tell her mother how much that book had frightened her and why it had upset her, but had not been able. "It was full of monsters," she said. "Full of monsters chasing after little children. There were killings, and ... I don't know ... bad feelings and hurt. Stuff like that." It had, in fact, struck her as almost pornographic; that was the word which kept eluding her, probably because she had never in her life spoken it, although she knew what it meant. "But Stan felt as if he'd rediscovered one of his childhood chums.

  .. He talked about writing to him, but I knew he wouldn't.

  ... I knew those stories made him feel bad, too ... and ... and ..."

  And then Patty Uris began to cry.

  That night, lacking roughly six months of being twenty-eight years from the day in 1957 when George Denbrough had met Pennywise the Clown, Stanley and Patty had been sitting in the den of their home in a suburb of Atlanta. The TV was on. Patty was sitting in the love-seat in front of it, dividing her attention between a pile of sewing and her favorite game-show, Family Feud. She simply adored Richard Dawson and thought the watch-chain he always wore was terribly sexy, although wild horses would not have drawn this admission out of her. She also liked the show because she almost always got the most popular answers (there were no right answers on Family Feud, exactly; only the most popular ones). She had once asked Stan why the questions that seemed so easy to her usually seemed so hard to the families on the show. "It's probably a lot tougher when you're up there under those lights," Stanley had replied, and it seemed to her that a shadow had drifted over his face. "Everything's a lot tougher when it's for real. That's when you choke. When it's for real."

  That was probably very true, she decided. Stanley had really fine insights into human nature sometimes. Much finer, she considered, than his old friend William Denbrough, who had gotten rich writing a bunch of horrorbooks which appealed to people's baser natures.

  Not that the Urises were doing so badly themselves! The suburb where they lived was a fine one, and the home which they had purchased for $87,000 in 1979 would probably now sell quickly and painlessly for $165,000--not that she wanted to sell, but such things were good to know. She sometimes drove back from the Fox Run Mall in her Volvo (Stanley drove a Mercedes dieset--teasing him, she called it Sedanley) and saw her house, set tastefully back behind low yew hedges, and thought: Who lives there? Why, Ido! Mrs. Stanley Uris does! This was not an entirely happy thought; mixed with it was a pride so fierce that it sometimes made her feel a bit ill. Once upon a time, you see, there had been a lonely eighteen-year-old girl named Patricia Blum who had been refused entry to the after-prom party that was held at the country club in the upstate town of Glointon, New York. She had been refused admission, of course, because her last name rhymed with plum. That was her, just a skinny little kike plum, 1967 that had been, and such discrimination was against the law, of course, har-de-har-har-har, and besides, it was all over now. Except that for part of her it was never going to be over. Part of her would always be walking back to the car with Michael Rosenblatt, listening to the crushed gravel under her pumps and his rented formal shoes, back to his father's car, which Michael had borrowed for the evening, and which he had spent the afternoon waxing. Part of her would always be walking next to Michael in his rente
d white dinner jacket--how it had glimmered in the soft spring night! She had been in a pale green evening gown which her mother declared made her look like a mermaid, and the idea of a kike mermaid was pretty funny, har-de-har-har-har. They had walked with their heads up and she had not wept--not then--but she had understood they weren't walking back, no, not really; what they had been doing was slinking back, slinking, rhymes with stinking, both of them feeling more Jewish than they had ever felt in their lives, feeling like pawnbrokers, feeling like cattle-car riders, feeling oily, long-nosed, sallow-skinned; feeling like mockies sheenies kikes; wanting to feel angry and not being able to feel angry--the anger came only later, when it didn't matter. At that moment she had only been able to feel ashamed, had only been able to ache. And then someone had laughed. A high shrill tittering laugh like a fast run of notes on a piano, and in the car she had been able to weep, oh you bet, here is the kike mermaid whose name rhymes with plum just weeping away like crazy. Mike Rosenblatt had put a clumsy, comforting hand on the back of her neck and she had twisted away from it, feeling ashamed, feeling dirty, feeling Jewish.

  The house set so tastefully back behind the yew hedges made that better ... but not all better. The hurt and shame were still there, and not even being accepted in this quiet, sleekly well-to-do neighborhood could quite make that endless walk with the sound of grating stones beneath their shoes stop happening. Not even being members of this country club, where the maitre d' always greeted them with a quietly respectful "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Uris." She would come home, cradled in her 1984 Volvo, and she would look at her house sitting on its expanse of green lawn, and she would often--all too often, she supposed--think of that shrill titter. And she would hope that the girl who had tittered was living in a shitty tract house with a goy husband who beat her, that she had been pregnant three times and had miscarried each time, that her husband cheated on her with diseased women, that she had slipped discs and fallen arches and cysts on her dirty tittering tongue.