It, Page 67

  Oh God it's Hansel and Gretel it's the witch the one that always scared me the worst because she ate the children--

  "You and your friends!" the witch screamed, laughing. "You and your friends! In the cage! In the cage until the oven's hot!" She screamed laughter, and Beverly ran for the door, but she ran as if in slow motion. The witch's laughter beat and swirled around her head, a cloud of bats. Beverly shrieked. The hall stank of sugar and nougat and toffee and sickening synthetic strawberries. The doorknob, mock crystal when she came in, was now a monstrous sugar diamond.

  "I worry about you, Bevvie ... I worry a LOT!"

  She turned, swirls of red hair floating around her face, to see her father staggering toward her down the hallway, wearing the witch's black dress and skull cameo; her father's face hung with doughy, running flesh, his eyes as black as obsidian, his hands clenching and unclenching, his mouth grinning with soupy fervor.

  "I beat you because I wanted to FUCK you, Bevvie, that's all I wanted to do, I wanted to FUCK you, I wanted to EAT you, I wanted to eat your PUSSY, I wanted to SUCK your CLIT up between my teeth, YUM-YUM, Bevvie, oooohhhhh, YUMMY IN MY TUMMY, I wanted to put you in the cage ... and get the oven hot ... and feel your CUNT ... your plump CUNT ... and when it was plump enough to eat ... to eat ... EAT..."

  Screaming, she grasped the sticky doorknob and bolted out onto a porch that was decorated with praline doodads and floored with fudge. Far away, dim, seeming to swim in her vision, she saw cars passing back and forth, and a woman pushing a cartful of groceries back from Costello's.

  I have to get out there, she thought, just barely coherent. That's reality out there, if I can only get out to the sidewalk--

  "Won't do you any good to run, Bevvie," her father

  (my fadder)

  told her, laughing. "We've waited a long time for this. This is going to be fun. This is going to be YUMMY in our TUMMIES."

  She looked back again and now her dead father was not wearing the witch's black dress but the clown suit with the big orange buttons. There was a 1958-style coonskin cap, the kind popularized by Fess Parker in the Disney movie about Davy Crockett, perched on its head. In one hand it held a bunch of balloons. In the other it held the leg of a child like a chicken drumstick. Written on each balloon was the legend IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE.

  "Tell your friends I am the last of a dying race," it said, grinning its sunken grin as it staggered and lurched down the porch steps after her. "The only survivor of a dying planet. I have come to rob all the women ... rape all the men ... and learn to do the Peppermint Twist!"

  It began to do a mad shuck-and-jive, balloons in one hand, severed, bleeding leg in the other. The clown costume writhed and flapped, but Beverly felt no wind. Her legs tangled in each other and she spilled to the pavement, throwing out her palms to take up the shock, which went all the way to her shoulders. The woman pushing the grocery cart paused and looked back doubtfully, then hurried on a little faster.

  The clown came toward her again, casting the severed leg aside. It landed on the lawn with an indescribable thud. Beverly only lay sprawled on the pavement for a moment, sure somewhere inside that she must wake soon, this couldn't be real, had to be a dream--

  She realized that wasn't true a moment before the clown's crooked, long-clawed fingers touched her. It was real; it could kill her. As it had killed the children.

  "The grackles know your real name!" she screamed at it suddenly. It recoiled, and it seemed to her that for a moment the grin on the lips inside the great red grin that had been painted on and around them became a grimace of hate and pain ... and perhaps of fear as well. It might only have been her imagination, and she certainly had no idea why she had said such a crazy thing, but it bought her an instant of time.

  She was on her feet and running. Brakes squealed and a hoarse voice, both mad and scared, yelled: "Why don't you look where you're going, you dumb quiff!" She had a blurred impression of the bakery truck that had almost hit her when she bolted into the street like a child after a rubber ball, and then she was standing on the opposite sidewalk, panting, a hot stitch in her left side. The bakery truck went on down Lower Main.

  The clown was gone. The leg was gone. The house still stood there, but she saw now that it was crumbling and deserted, the windows boarded up, the steps leading up to the porch cracked and broken.

  Was I really in there, or did I dream it all?

  But her jeans were dirty, her yellow blouse smeared with dust.

  And there was chocolate on her fingers.

  She rubbed them on the legs of her jeans and walked away fast, her face hot, her back cold as ice, her eyeballs seeming to pulse in and out with the rapid thud of her heart.

  We can't beat It. Whatever It is, we can't beat It. It even wants us to try--It wants to settle the old score. Can't be happy with a draw, I guess. We ought to get out of here ... just leave.

  Something brushed against her calf, light as a cat's questing paw.

  She jerked away from it with a little shriek. She looked down and cringed, one hand against her mouth.

  It was a ballon, as yellow as her blouse. Written on the side of it in electric blue were the words THAT'S WIGHT, WABBIT.

  As she watched, it went bouncing lightly up the street, urged by the pleasant late-spring breeze.

  2

  Richie Tozier Makes Tracks

  Well, there was the day Henry and his friends chased me--before the end of school, this was....

  Richie was walking along Outer Canal Street, past Bassey Park. Now he stopped, hands stuffed in his pockets, looking toward the Kissing Bridge but not really seeing it.

  I got away from them in the toy department of Freese's....

  Since the mad conclusion of the reunion lunch, he had been walking aimlessly, trying to make his peace with the awful things which had been in the fortune cookies ... or the things which had seemed to be in the cookies. He thought that most likely nothing at all had come out of them. It had been a group hallucination brought on by all the spooky shit they had been talking about. The best proof of the hypothesis was that Rose had seen nothing at all. Of course, Beverly's parents had never seen any of the blood that came out of the bathroom drain either, but this wasn't the same.

  No? Why not?

  "Because we're grownups now," he muttered, and discovered the thought had absolutely no power or logic at all; it might as well have been a nonsense line from a kid's skip-rope chant.

  He started to walk again.

  I went up by City Center and sat down on a park bench for awhile and I thought I saw ...

  He stopped again, frowning.

  Saw what?

  ... but that was just something I dreamed.

  Was it? Was it really?

  He looked to the left and saw the big glass-brick-and-steel building that had looked so modern in the late fifties and now looked rather antique and tacky.

  And here I am, he thought. Right back to fucking City Center. Scene of that other hallucination. Or dream. Or whatever it was.

  The others saw him as the Klass Klown, the Krazy Kut-up, and he had fallen neatly and easily into that role again. Ah, we all fell neatly and easily back into our old roles again, didn't you notice? But was there anything very unusual about that? He thought you would probably see much the same thing at any tenth or twentieth high-school reunion--the class comedian who had discovered a vocation for the priesthood in college would, after two drinks, revert almost automatically to the wiseacre he had been; the Great English Brain who had wound up with a GM truck dealership would suddenly begin spouting off about John Irving or John Cheever; the guy who had played with the Moondogs on Saturday nights and who had gone on to become a mathematics professor at Cornell would suddenly find himself on stage with the band, a Fender guitar strapped over his shoulder, whopping out "Gloria" or "Surfin' Bird" with gleeful drunken ferocity. What was it Springsteen said? No retreat, baby, no surrender ... but it was easier to believe in the oldies on the record-player af
ter a couple of drinks or some pretty good Panama Red.

  But, Richie believed, it was the reversion that was the hallucination, not the present life. Maybe the child was the father of the man, but fathers and sons often shared very different interests and only a passing resemblance. They--

  But you say grownups and now it sounds like nonsense; it sounds like so much bibble-babble. Why is that, Richie? Why?

  Because Derry is as weird as ever. Why don't we just leave it at that?

  Because things weren't that simple, that was why.

  As a kid he had been a goof-off, a sometimes vulgar, sometimes amusing comedian, because it was one way to get along without getting killed by kids like Henry Bowers or going absolutely loony-tunes with boredom and loneliness. He realized now that a lot of the problem had been his own mind, which was usually moving at a speed ten or twenty times that of his classmates. They had thought him strange, weird, or even suicidal, depending on the escapade in question, but maybe it had been a simple case of mental overdrive--if anything about being in constant mental overdrive was simple.

  Anyway, it was the sort of thing you got under control after awhile--you got it under control or you found outlets for it, guys like Kinky Briefcase or Buford Kissdrivel, for instance. Richie had discovered that in the months after he had wandered into the college radio station, pretty much on a whim, and had discovered everything he had ever wanted during his first week behind the microphone. He hadn't been very good at first; he had been too excited to be good. But he had understood his potential not to be just good at the job but great at it, and just that knowledge had been enough to put him over the moon on a cloud of euphoria. At the same time he had begun to understand the great principle that moved the universe, at least that part of the universe which had to do with careers and success: you found the crazy guy who was running around inside of you, fucking up your life. You chased him into a corner and grabbed him. But you didn't kill him. Oh no. Killing was too good for the likes of that little bastard. You put a harness over his head and then started plowing. The crazy guy worked like a demon once you had him in the traces. And he supplied you with a few chucks from time to time. That was really all there was. And that was enough.

  He had been funny, all right, a laugh a minute, but in the end he had outgrown the nightmares that were on the dark side of all those laughs. Or he thought he had. Until today, when the word grownup suddenly stopped making sense to his own ears. And now here was something else to cope with, or at least think about; here was the huge and totally idiotic statue of Paul Bunyan in front of City Center.

  I must be the exception that proves the rule, Big Bill.

  Are you sure there was nothing, Richie? Nothing at all?

  Up by City Center ... I thought I saw ...

  Sharp pain needled at his eyes for the second time that day and he clutched at them, a startled moan coming out of him. Then it was gone again, as quickly as it had come. But he had also smelled something, hadn't he? Something that wasn't really there, but something that had been there, something that made him think of

  (I'm right here with you Richie hold my hand can you catch hold)

  Mike Hanlon. It was smoke that had made his eyes sting and water. Twenty-seven years ago they had breathed that smoke; in the end there had just been Mike and himself left and they had seen--

  But it was gone.

  He took a step closer to the plastic Paul Bunyan statue, as amazed by its cheerful vulgarity now as he had been overwhelmed by its size as a child. The mythical Paul stood twenty feet high, and the base added another six feet. He stood smiling down at the car and pedestrian traffic on Outer Canal Street from the edge of the City Center lawn. City Center had been erected in the years 1954-55 for a minor-league basketball team that had never materialized. The Derry City Council had voted money for the statue a year later, in 1956. It had been hotly debated both in the council's public meetings and in the letters-to-the-editor columns of the Derry News. Many thought it would be a perfectly lovely statue, certain to become a tourist attraction of note. There were others who found the idea of a plastic Paul Bunyan horrible, garish, and unbelievably gauche. The art teacher at Derry High School, Richie remembered, had written a letter to the News saying that if such a monstrosity were actually to be erected in Derry, she would blow it up. Grinning, Richie wondered if that babe's contract had been renewed.

  The controversy--which Richie recognized now as an utterly typical big-town/small-city tempest in a teapot--had raged for six months, and of course it had been entirely meaningless; the statue had been purchased, and even if the City Council had done something as aberrant (especially for New England) as deciding not to use an item for which money had been paid, where in God's name could it have been stored? Then the statue, not really sculpted at all but simply cast in some Ohio plastics plant, had been set in place, still shrouded in a whack of canvas big enough to serve as a clipper-ship sail. It had been unveiled on May 13th, 1957, which was the incorporated township's one-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday. One faction gave voice to predictable moans of outrage; the other to equally predictable moans of rapture.

  When Paul was revealed that day he was wearing his bib overalls and a red-and-white-checked shirt. His beard was splendidly black, splendidly full, splendidly lumberjack-y. A plastic axe, surely the Godzilla of all plastic axes, was slung over one shoulder, and he grinned unceasingly at the northern skies, which on the day of the unveiling had been as blue as the skin of Paul's reputed companion (Babe was not present at the unveiling, however; the cost estimate of adding a blue ox to the tableau had been prohibitive).

  The children who attended the ceremonies (there were hundreds of them, and ten-year-old Richie Tozier, in the company of his dad, had been among them) were totally and uncritically delighted by the plastic giant. Parents boosted toddlers up onto the square pedestal on which Paul stood, took photos, and then watched with mixed apprehension and amusement as the kids climbed and crawled, laughing, over Paul's huge black boots (correction: huge black plastic boots).

  It had been March of the following year when Richie, exhausted and terrified, had finished up on one of the benches in front of the statue after eluding--by the barest of margins--Messrs. Bowers, Criss, and Huggins in a chase that had led from Derry Elementary School across most of the downtown area. He had finally ditched them in the toy department of Freese's Department Store.

  The Derry branch of Freese's was a poor thing compared with the grand downtown department store in Bangor, but Richie had been far past caring about such things--by then it was a case of any port in a storm. Henry Bowers had been right behind him and by then Richie had been flagging badly. He had dodged into the mouth of the department store's revolving door as a last resort. Henry, who apparently didn't understand the physics of such devices, had nearly lost the tips of his fingers trying to grab Richie as Richie trundled around and into the store.

  Pelting downstairs, shirttail flying out behind him, he had heard the revolving door give off a series of reports almost as loud as TV gunfire and understood that Larry, Moe, and Curly were still after him. He was laughing as he went down the stairs to the basement level but that was only a nervous tic; he was as full of terror as a rabbit caught in a wire snare. They really meant to beat him up good this time (he had no idea that in another ten weeks or so he would believe the three of them, Henry in particular, capable of anything short of murder, and he surely would have whitened with shock if he had known of the apocalyptic rockfight in July, when even that last qualification would disappear from his mind). And the whole thing had been so utterly, typically stupid.

  Richie and the other boys in his fifth-grade class had been filing into the gym. A sixthgrade class, Henry hulking among them like an ox among cows, had been coming out. Although he was still in the fifth grade, Henry went to gym with the older boys. The overhead pipes had been dripping again and Mr. Fazio hadn't yet gotten around to putting up his CAUTION! WET FLOOR! sign on its little easel. Henry had
slipped in a puddle and had landed on his keister.

  Before he could stop it Richie's traitor mouth had bugled: "Way to go, banana-heels!"

  There had been an explosion of laughter from both Henry's classmates and Richie's, but there had been no laughter on Henry's face as he picked himself up--only a dull flush the color of freshly fired brick.

  "Later for you, four-eyes," he said, and walked on.

  The laughter died at once. The boys in the hall looked at Richie as one already dead. Henry did not pause to check reactions; he simply walked off, head down, elbows red from catching the fall, a large wet place on the seat of his pants. Looking at that wet spot, Richie felt his suicidally witty mouth drop open again ... but this time he snapped it shut again, so fast he almost amputated the tip of his tongue with the falling gate of his teeth.

  Well, but he'll forget, he told himself uneasily as he changed up for gym. Sure he will. Ole Hank just hasn't got that many memory circuits working. Every time he takes a shit he probably has to look up the directions in the instruction booklet, ha-ha.

  Ha-ha.

  "You're dead, Trashmouth," Vince "Boogers" Taliendo told him, pulling his jock up over a dork roughly the size and shape of an anemic peanut. He said it with a certain sad respect. "Don't worry, though. I'll bring flowers."

  "Cut off your ears and bring cauliflowers," Richie had come back smartly, and everyone laughed, even ole "Boogers" Taliendo laughed, why not, they could all afford to laugh. What, me worry? They would all be home watching Jimmy Dodd and the Mouseketeers on the Mickey Mouse Club or Frankie Lymon singing "I'm Not a Juvenile Delinquent" on American Bandstand while Richie went shagging ass through ladies' lingerie and housewares on his way to the toy department with sweat pouring down his back into the crack of his ass and his terrified balls strung up so high they felt like they might be hung over his bellybutton. Sure, they could laugh. Har-de-har-har-har.

  Henry hadn't forgotten. Richie had left by the door at the kindergarten end of the school building just in case, but Henry had stuck Belch Huggins there, also just in case. Har-de-har-har-har.