It, Page 69

  "Fuck this," Richie Tozier said in a low voice that was not quite steady, and started to get up.

  He would go back to the Derry Town House and take a nap. If this was Memory Lane, he preferred the L.A. Freeway at rush-hour. The pain in his eyes was probably no more than a signal of exhaustion and jet-lag, plus the stress of meeting the past all at once, in one afternoon. Enough shocks; enough exploring. He didn't like the way his mind was skittering from one subject to the next. What was that Peter Gabriel tune? "Shock the Monkey." Well, this monkey had been shocked enough. It was time to catch some z's and maybe gain a little perspective.

  As he rose his eyes went to the marquee in front of City Center again. All at once the strength ran out of his legs and he sat down again. Hard.

  RICHIE TOZIER MAN OF 1000 VOICES

  RETURNS TO DERRY LAND OF 1000 DANCES

  IN HONOR OF TRASHMOUTH'S RETURN

  CITY CENTER PROUDLY

  PRESENTS

  THE RICHIE TOZIER "ALL-DEAD" ROCK SHOW

  BUDDY HOLLY RICHIE VALENS THE BIG BOPPER

  FRANKIE LYMON GENE VINCENT MARVIN GAYE

  HOUSE BAND

  JIMI HENDRIX LEAD GUITAR

  JOHN LENNON RHYTHM GUITAR

  PHIL LINOTT BASS GUITAR

  KEITH MOON DRUMS

  SPECIAL GUEST VOCALIST JIM MORRISON

  WELCOME HOME RICHIE!

  YOU'RE DEAD TOO!

  He felt as if someone had whopped all the breath out of him ... and then he heard that sound again, that sound that was half pressure on the skin and eardrums, that keen homicidal whispering rush--Swiipppp! He rolled off the bench onto the gravel, thinking So this is what they mean by deja-vu, now you know, you'll never have to ask anybody again--

  He hit on his shoulder and rolled, looking up at the Paul Bunyan statue--only it was no longer Paul Bunyan. The clown stood there instead, resplendent and evident, fantastic in plastic, twenty feet of Day-Glo colors, its painted face surmounting a cosmic comic ruff. Orange pompom buttons cast in plastic, each as big as a volleyball, ran down the front of the silvery suit. Instead of an axe it held a huge bunch of plastic balloons. Engraved on each were two legends: IT'S STILL ROCK AND ROLL TO ME and RICHIE TOZIER'S "ALL-DEAD" ROCK SHOW.

  He scrambled backward, using his heels and his palms. Gravel went down the back of his pants. He heard a seam tear loose in the underarm of his Rodeo Drive sportcoat. He rolled over, gained his feet, staggered, looked back. The clown looked down at him. Its eyes rolled wetly in their sockets.

  "Did I give you a scare, m'man?" it rumbled.

  And Richie heard his mouth say, quite independently of his frozen brain: "Cheap thrills in the back of my car, Bozo. That's all."

  The clown grinned and nodded as if it had expected no more. Red paint-bleeding lips parted to show teeth like fangs, each one coming to a razor point. "I could have you now if I wanted you now," it said. "But this is going to be too much fun."

  "Fun for me too," Richie heard his mouth say. "The most fun of all when we come to take your fucking head off, baby."

  The clown's grin spread wider and wider. It raised one hand, clad in a white glove, and Richie felt the wind of the movement blow the hair off his forehead as it had on that day twenty-seven years ago. The clown's index finger popped out at him. It was as big as a beam.

  Big as a bea--, Richie thought, and then the pain struck again. It drove rusty spikes into the soft jelly of his eyes. He screamed and clutched at his face.

  "Before removing the mote from thy neighbor's eye, attend the beam in thine own," the clown intoned, its words rumbling and vibrating, and Richie was again enveloped in the sweet stink of its carrion breath.

  He looked up, and took half a dozen hurried steps backward. The clown was bending down, its gloved hands on its gaily pantalooned knees.

  "Want to play some more, Richie? How about if I point at your pecker and give you prostate cancer? Or I could point at your head and give you a good old brain tumor--although I'm sure some people would say that would only be adding to what was already there. I can point at your mouth and your stupid flapping tongue will turn into so much running pus. I can do it, Richie. Want to see?"

  Its eyes were widening, widening, and in those black pupils, each as big as a softball, Richie saw the mad darkness that must exist over the rim of the universe; he saw a shitty happiness that he felt would drive him insane. In that moment he understood It could do any of these things and more.

  And yet again he heard his mouth, but this time it was not his voice, or any of his created Voices, past or present; it was a Voice he had never heard before. Later he would tell the others, hesitantly, that it was a kind of Mr. Jiveass Nigger Voice, loud and proud, self-parodying and screechy.

  "Git off mah case you big ole honky clown!" he shouted, and suddenly he was laughing again. "No shit an no shine, muhfuh! I got d'walk, I got d'talk, and I got d'big boppin cock! I got d'time, I got d'mine, I'm a man wit' a plan an if you doan shit, you goan git! You hear me, you whiteface bunghole?"

  Richie thought the clown recoiled, but he did not stick around to find out for sure. He ran, elbows pumping, sportcoat flying out in wings behind him, not caring that a father who had stopped so his toddler could admire Paul was now staring warily at him, as if he had gone crazy. As a matter of fact, folks, Richie thought, I feel like I've gone crazy. Oh God do I ever. And that had to have been the shittiest Grandmaster Flash imitation in history but somehow it did the trick, somehow--

  And then the clown's voice thundered after him. The father of the little boy did not hear it, but the toddler's face suddenly pinched in upon itself and he began to wail. The dad picked his son up and hugged him, bewildered. Even through his own terror, Richie observed this little sideshow closely. The voice of the clown was perhaps angrily gleeful, perhaps just angry: "We've got the eye down here, Richie

  ... you hear me? The one that crawls. If you don't want to fly, don't wanna say goodbye, you come on down under this here town and give a great big hi to one great big eye! You come down and see it anytime. Just any old time you like. You hear me, Richie? Bring your yo-yo. Have Beverly wear a big full skirt with four or five petticoats underneath. Have her wear her husband's ring around her neck! Get Eddie to wear his saddle-shoes! We'll play some bop, Richie! We'll play AAALLLL THE HITS!"

  Reaching the sidewalk, Richie dared to look back over his shoulder, and what he saw was in no way comforting. Paul Bunyan was still gone, and now the clown was gone, too. Where they had stood there was now a twenty-foot-high plastic statue of Buddy Holly. He was wearing a button on one of the narrow lapels of his plaid sportcoat. RICHIE TOZIER'S

  "ALL-DEAD" ROCK SHOW, the button read.

  One bow of Buddy's glasses had been mended with adhesive tape.

  The little boy was still crying hysterically; his father was walking rapidly back toward downtown with the weeping child in his arms. He gave Richie a wide berth.

  Richie got walking

  (feets don't fail me now)

  trying not to think about

  (we'll play AAALLLL THE HITS!)

  what had just happened. All he wanted to think about was the monster jolt of Scotch he was going to have in the Derry Town House bar before he went up to take that nap.

  The thought of a drink--just your ordinary garden-variety drink--made him feel a little better. He looked over his shoulder one more time and the fact that Paul Bunyan was back, grinning at the sky, plastic axe over his shoulder, made him feel better still. Richie began to walk faster, making tracks, putting distance between himself and that statue. He had even begun to think about the possibility of hallucinations when the pain struck his eyes again, deep and agonizing, causing him to cry out hoarsely. A pretty young girl who had been walking ahead of him, looking dreamily up at the breaking clouds, looked back at him, hesitated, then hurried over.

  "Mister, are you all right?"

  "It's my contacts," he said in a strained voice. "My damned contact le--oh my God that hurts!"

/>   This time he got his forefingers up so quickly he almost jabbed them into his eyes. He pulled down the lower lids and thought, I won't be able to blink them out, that's what's going to happen, I won't be able to blink them out and it's just going to go on hurting and hurting and hurting until I go blind go blind go bl--

  But one blink did it as one blink always had. The sharp and defined world, where colors stayed inside the lines and where faces that you saw were clear and obvious, simply fell away. Wide bands of pastel fuzz took their place. And although he and the high-school girl, who was both helpful and concerned, searched the paving of the sidewalk for almost fifteen minutes, neither could find even a single lens.

  In the back of his head Richie seemed to hear the clown laughing.

  5

  Bill Denbrough Sees a Ghost

  Bill did not see Pennywise that afternoon--but he did see a ghost. A real ghost. So Bill believed then, and no subsequent event caused him to change his mind.

  He had walked up Witcham Street and paused for some time by the drain where George met his end on that rainy October day in 1957. He squatted down and peered into the drain, which was cut into the stonework of the curbing. His heart was beating hard, but he looked anyway.

  "Come out, why don't you," he said in a low voice, and he had the not-quite-mad idea that his voice was floating along dark and dripping passageways, not dying out but continuing onward and onward, feeding on its own echoes, bouncing off moss-covered stone walls and long-dead machinery. He felt it float over still and sullen waters and perhaps issue softly from a hundred different drains in other parts of the city at the same time.

  "Come out of there or we'll come in and g-get you."

  He waited nervily for a response, crouched down with his hands between his thighs like a catcher between pitches. There was no response.

  He was about to stand up when a shadow fell over him.

  Bill looked up sharply, eagerly, ready for anything ... but it was only a little kid, maybe ten, maybe eleven. He was wearing faded Boy Scout shorts which displayed his scabby knees to good advantage. He had a Freeze-Pop in one hand and a Fiberglas skateboard which looked almost as battered as his knees in the other. The Freeze-Pop was a fluorescent orange. The skateboard was a fluorescent green.

  "You always talk into the sewers, mister?" the boy asked.

  "Only in Derry," Bill said.

  They looked at each other solemnly for a moment and then burst into laughter at the same time.

  "I want to ask you a stupid queh-question," Bill said.

  "Okay," the kid said.

  "You ever h-hear anything down in one of these?"

  The kid looked at Bill as though he had flipped out. "O-Okay," Bill said, "forget I a-asked."

  He started to walk away and had gotten maybe twelve steps--he was headed up the hill, vaguely thinking he would take a look at the home place--when the kid called, "Mister?"

  Bill turned back. He had his sportcoat hooked on his finger and slung over his shoulder. His collar was unbuttoned, his tie loosened. The boy was watching him carefully, as if already regretting his decision to speak further. Then he shrugged, as if saying Oh what the hell.

  "Yeah."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah."

  "What did it say?"

  "I don't know. It talked some foreign language. I heard it coming out of one of those pumpin stations down in the Barrens. One of those pumpin stations, they look like pipes coming out of the ground--"

  "I know what you mean. Was it a kid you heard?"

  "At first it was a kid, then it sounded like a man." The boy paused. "I was some scared. I ran home and told my father. He said maybe it was an echo or something, coming all the way down the pipes from someone's house."

  "Do you believe that?"

  The boy smiled charmingly. "I read in my Ripley's Believe It or Not book that there was this guy, he got music from his teeth. Radio music. His fillings were, like, little radios. I guess if I believed that, I could believe anything."

  "A-Ayuh," Bill said. "But did you believe it?"

  The boy reluctantly shook his head.

  "Did you ever hear those voices again?"

  "Once when I was taking a bath," the boy said. "It was a girl's voice. Just crying. No words. I was ascared to pull the plug when I was done because I thought I might, you know, drownd her."

  Bill nodded again.

  The kid was looking at Bill openly now, his eyes shining and fascinated. "You know about those voices, mister?"

  "I heard them," Bill said. "A long, long time ago. Did you know any of the k-kids that have been murdered here, son?"

  The shine went out of the kid's eyes; it was replaced by caution and disquiet. "My dad says I'm not supposed to talk to strangers. He says anybody could be that killer." He took an additional step away from Bill, moving into the dappled shade of an elm tree that Bill had once driven his bike into twenty-seven years ago. He had taken a spill and bent his handlebars.

  "Not me, kid," he said. "I've been in England for the last four months. I just got into Derry yesterday."

  "I still don't have to talk to you," the kid replied.

  "That's right," Bill agreed. "It's a f-f-free country."

  He paused and then said, "I used to pal around with Johnny Feury some of the time. He was a good kid. I cried," the boy finished matter-of-factly, and slurped down the rest of his Freeze-Pop. As an afterthought he ran out his tongue, which was temporarily bright orange, and lapped off his arm.

  "Keep away from the sewers and drains," Bill said quietly. "Keep away from empty places and deserted places. Stay out of trainyards. But most of all, stay away from the sewers and the drains."

  The shine was back in the kid's eyes, and he said nothing for a very long time. Then: "Mister? You want to hear something funny?"

  "Sure."

  "You know that movie where the shark ate all the people up?"

  "Everyone does. J-J-Jaws. "

  "Well, I got this friend, you know? His name's Tommy Vicananza, and he's not that bright. Toys in the attic, you get what I mean?"

  "Yeah."

  "He thinks he saw that shark in the Canal. He was up there by himself in Bassey Park a couple of weeks ago, and he said he seen this fin. He says it was eight or nine feet tall. Just the fin was that tall, you get me? He goes, 'That's what killed Johnny and the other kids. It was Jaws, I know because I saw it.' So I go, 'That Canal's so polluted nothing could live in it, not even a minnow. And you think you saw Jaws in there. You got toys in the attic, Tommy.' Tommy says it reared right out of the water like it did at the end of that movie and tried to bite him and he just got back in time. Pretty funny, huh, mister?"

  "Pretty funny," Bill agreed.

  "Toys in the attic, right?"

  Bill hesitated. "Stay away from the Canal too, son. You follow?"

  "You mean you believe it?"

  Bill hesitated. He meant to shrug. Instead he nodded.

  The kid let out his breath in a low, hissing rush. He hung his head as if ashamed. "Yeah. Sometimes I think I must have toys in the attic."

  "I know what you mean." Bill walked over to the kid, who glanced up at him solemnly but didn't shy away this time. "You're killing your knees on that board, son."

  The kid glanced down at his scabby knees and grinned. "Yeah, I guess so. I bail out sometimes."

  "Can I try it?" Bill asked suddenly.

  The kid looked at him gape-mouthed at first, then laughing. "That'd be funny," he said. "I never saw a grownup on a skateboard."

  "I'll give you a quarter," Bill said.

  "My dad said--"

  "Never take money or c-candy from strangers. Good advice. I'll still give you a q-quarter. What do you say? Just to the corner of Juh-Jackson Street."

  "Never mind the quarter," the kid said. He burst into laughter again--a gay and uncomplicated sound. A fresh sound. "I don't need your quarter. I got two bucks. I'm practically rich. I got to see this, though. Just don't blame me if yo
u break something."

  "Don't worry," Bill said. "I'm insured."

  He turned one of the skateboard's scuffed wheels with his finger, liking the speedy ease with which it turned--it sounded like there was about a million ball-bearings in there. It was a good sound. It called up something very old in Bill's chest. Some desire as warm as want, as lovely as love. He smiled.

  "What do you think?" the kid asked.

  "I think I'm g-gonna kill myself," Bill said, and the kid laughed.

  Bill put the skateboard on the sidewalk and put one foot on it. He rolled it back and forth experimentally. The kid watched. In his mind Bill saw himself rolling down Witcham Street toward Jackson on the kid's avocado-green skateboard, the tails of his sportcoat ballooning out behind him, his bald head gleaming in the sun, his knees bent in that fragile way snowbunnies bend their knees their first day on the slopes. It was a posture that told you that in their heads they were already falling down. He bet the kid didn't ride the board like that. He bet the kid rode

  (to beat the devil)

  like there was no tomorrow.

  That good feeling died out of his chest. He saw, all too clearly, the board going out from under his feet, shooting unencumbered down the street, an improbable fluorescent green, a color that only a child could love. He saw himself coming down on his ass, maybe on his back. Slow dissolve to a private room at the Derry Home Hospital, like the one they had visited Eddie in after his arm had been broken. Bill Denbrough in a full body-cast, one leg held up by pullies and wires. A doctor comes in, looks at his chart, looks at him, and then says: "You were guilty of two major lapses, Mr. Denbrough. The first was mismanagement of a skateboard. The second was forgetting that you are now approaching forty years of age."

  He bent, picked the skateboard back up, and handed it back to the kid. "I guess not," he said.

  "Chicken," the kid said, not unkindly.

  Bill hooked his thumbs into his armpits and flapped his elbows. "Buck-buck-buck," he said.

  The kid laughed. "Listen, I got to get home."