It (35 page)

They float, Ben! They all float! Try one and see!

The clown began walking along the ice toward the Canal bridge where Ben stood. Ben watched him come, not moving; he watched as a bird watches an approaching snake. The balloons should have burst in the intense cold, but they did not; they floated above and ahead of the clown when they should have been streaming out behind him, trying to escape back into the Barrens . . . where, some part of Ben's mind assured him, this creature had come from in the first place.

Now Ben noticed something else.

Although the last of the daylight had struck a rosy glow across the ice of the Canal, the clown cast no shadow. None at all.

You'll like it here, Ben,
the clown said. Now it was close enough so Ben could hear the
clud-clud
sound its funny shoes made as they advanced over the uneven ice.
You'll like it here, I promise, all the boys and girls I meet like it here because it's like Pleasure Island in
Pinocchio
and Never-Never Land in
Peter Pan;
they never have to grow up and that's what all the kiddies want! So come on! See the sights, have a balloon, feed the elephants, ride the Chute-the-Chutes! Oh you'll like it and oh Ben how you'll
float—

And in spite of his fear, Ben found that part of him
did
want a balloon. Who in all the world owned a balloon which would float into the wind? Who had even
heard
of such a thing? Yes . . . he wanted a balloon, and he wanted to see the clown's face, which was bent down toward the ice, as if to keep it out of that killer wind.

What might have happened if the five o'clock whistle atop the Derry Town Hall hadn't blown just then Ben didn't know . . . didn't
want
to know. The important thing was that it
did
blow, an ice-pick of sound drilling into the deep winter cold. The clown looked up, as if startled, and Ben saw its face.

The mummy! Oh my God it's the mummy!
was his first thought, accompanied by a swoony horror that caused him to clamp his hands down viciously on the bridge's railing to keep from fainting. Of course it hadn't been the mummy,
couldn't
have been the mummy. Oh, there were Egyptian mummies, plenty of them, he knew that, but his first thought had been that it was
the
mummy—the dusty monster played by Boris Karloff in the old movie he had stayed up late to watch just last month on
Shock Theater.

No, it wasn't
that
mummy, couldn't be, movie monsters weren't real, everyone knew that, even little kids. But—

It wasn't make-up the clown was wearing. Nor was the clown simply swaddled in a bunch of bandages. There
were
bandages, most of them around its neck and wrists, blowing back in the wind, but Ben could see the clown's face clearly. It was deeply lined, the skin a parchment map of wrinkles, tattered cheeks, arid flesh. The skin of its forehead was split but bloodless. Dead lips grinned back from a maw in which teeth leaned like tombstones. Its gums were pitted and black. Ben could see no eyes, but
something
glittered far back in the charcoal pits of those puckered sockets, something like the cold jewels in the eyes of Egyptian scarab beetles. And although the wind was the wrong way, it seemed to him that he could smell cinnamon and spice, rotting cerements treated with weird drugs, sand, blood so old it had dried to flakes and grains of rust . . .

“We all float down here,” the mummy-clown croaked, and Ben realized with fresh horror that somehow it had reached the bridge, it was now just below him, reaching up with a dry and twisted hand from which flaps of skin rustled like pennons, a hand through which bone like yellow ivory showed.

One almost fleshless finger caressed the tip of his boot. Ben's paralysis broke. He pounded the rest of the way across the bridge with the five o'clock whistle still shrieking in his ears; it only ceased as he reached the far side. It had to be a mirage,
had
to be. The clown simply could not have come so far during the whistle's ten- or fifteen-second blast.

But his fear was not a mirage; neither were the hot tears which spurted from his eyes and froze on his cheeks a second after being shed. He ran, boots thudding on the sidewalk, and behind him he could hear the mummy in the clown suit climbing up from the Canal, ancient stony fingernails scraping across iron, old tendons creaking like dry hinges. He could hear the arid whistle of its breath pulling in and pushing out of nostrils as devoid of moisture as the tunnels under the Great Pyramid. He could smell its shroud of sandy spices and he knew that in a moment its hands, as fleshless as the geometrical constructions he made with his Erector Set, would descend upon his shoulders. They would turn him around and he would stare into that
wrinkled, smiling face. The dead river of its breath would wash over him. Those black eyesockets with their deep glowing depths would bend over him. The toothless mouth would yawn, and he would have his balloon. Oh yes. All the balloons he wanted.

But when he reached the corner of his own street, sobbing and winded, his heart slamming crazed, leaping beats into his ears, when he at last looked back over his shoulder, the street was empty. The arched bridge with its low concrete sides and its oldfashioned cobblestone paving was also empty. He could not see the Canal itself, but he felt that if he could, he would see nothing there, either. No; if the mummy had not been a hallucination or a mirage, if it had been real, it would be waiting
under
the bridge—like the troll in the story of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.”

Under. Hiding under.

Ben hurried home, looking back every few steps until the door was safely shut and locked behind him. He explained to his mother—who was so tired from a particularly hard day at the mill that she had not, in truth, much missed him—that he had been helping Mrs. Douglas count books. Then he sat down to a dinner of noodles and Sunday's leftover turkey. He stuffed three helpings into himself, and the mummy seemed more distant and dreamlike with each helping. It was not real, those things were never real, they came fully to life only between the commercials of the late-night TV movies or during the Saturday matinees, where if you were lucky you could get two monsters for a quarter—and if you had an extra quarter, you could buy all the popcorn you could eat.

No, they were not real. TV monsters and movie monsters and comic-book monsters were not real. Not until you went to bed and couldn't sleep; not until the last four pieces of candy, wrapped in tissues and kept under your pillow against the evils of the night, were gobbled up; not until the bed itself turned into a lake of rancid dreams and the wind screamed outside and you were afraid to look at the window because there might be a
face
there, an ancient grinning
face
that had not rotted but simply dried like an old leaf, its eyes sunken diamonds pushed deep into dark sockets; not until you saw one ripped and clawlike hand holding out a bunch of balloons:
See the sights, have a balloon, feed the elephants, ride the Chute-the-Chutes! Ben, oh, Ben, how you'll
float—

Ben awoke with a gasp, the dream of the mummy still on him, panicked by the close, vibrating dark all around him. He jerked, and the root stopped supporting him and poked him in the back again, as if in exasperation.

He saw light and scrambled for it. He crawled out into afternoon sunlight and the babble of the stream, and everything fell into place again. It was summer, not winter. The mummy had not carried him away to its desert crypt; Ben had simply hidden from the big kids in a sandy hole under a half-uprooted tree. He was in the Barrens. Henry and his buddies had gone to town in a small way on a couple of kids playing downstream because they hadn't been able to find Ben and go to town on him in a big way.
Ta-ta, boys. It was a real baby dam, believe me. You're better off without it.

Ben looked glumly down at his ruined clothes. His mother was going to give him sixteen different flavors of holy old hell.

He had slept just long enough to stiffen up. He slid down the embankment and then began to walk along the stream, wincing at every step. He was a medley of aches and pains; it felt like Spike Jones was playing a fast tune on broken glass inside most of his muscles. There seemed to be dried or drying blood on every inch of exposed skin. The dam-building kids would be gone anyway, he consoled himself. He wasn't sure how long he'd slept, but even if it had only been half an hour, the encounter with Henry and his friends would have convinced Denbrough and his pal that some other place—like Timbuktu, maybe—would be better for their health.

Ben plugged grimly along, knowing if the big kids came back now he would not stand a chance of outrunning them. He hardly cared.

He rounded an elbow-bend in the stream and just stood there for a moment, looking. The dam-builders were still there. One of them was indeed Stuttering Bill Denbrough. He was kneeling beside the other boy, who was propped against the stream-bank in a sitting position. This other kid's head was thrown so far back that his adam's apple stood out like a triangular plug. There was dried blood around his nose, on his chin, and painted along his neck in a couple of streams. He had something white clasped loosely in one hand.

Stuttering Bill looked around sharply and saw Ben standing there. Ben saw with dismay that something was very wrong with the boy propped up on the bank; Denbrough was obviously scared to death. He thought miserably:
Won't this day
ever
end?

“I wonder if yuh-yuh-you could help m-m-me,” Bill Denbrough said. “H-His ah-ah-ah-asp-p-irator is eh-hempty. I think he m-might be—”

His face froze, turned red. He dug at the word, stuttering like a machine-gun. Spittle flew from his lips, and it took almost thirty seconds' worth of “d-d-d-d” before Ben realized Denbrough was trying to say the other kid might be dying.

Bill Denbrough thinks:
I'm damned near space-travelling; I might as well be inside a bullet shot from a gun.

This thought, although perfectly true, is not one he finds especially comfortable. In fact, for the first hour following the Concorde's takeoff (or perhaps liftoff would be a better way to put it) from Heathrow, he has been coping with a mild case of claustrophobia. The airplane is narrow—unsettlingly so. The meal is just short of exquisite, but the flight attendants who serve it must twist and bend and squat to get the job done; they look like a troupe of gymnasts. Watching this strenuous service takes some of the pleasure out of the food for Bill, although his seatmate doesn't seem particularly bothered.

The seatmate is another drawback. He's fat and not particularly clean; it may be Ted Lapidus cologne on top of his skin, but beneath it Bill detects the unmistakable odors of dirt and sweat. He's not being very particular about his left elbow, either; every now and then it strikes Bill with a soft thud.

His eyes are drawn again and again to the digital readout at the front of the cabin. It shows how fast this British bullet is going. Now, as the Concorde reaches its cruising speed, it tops out at just over mach 2. Bill takes his pen from his shirt pocket and uses its tip to tap buttons on the computer watch Audra gave him last Christmas. If the machometer is right—and Bill has absolutely no reason to think it is not—then they are busting along at a speed of eighteen miles per minute. He is not sure this is anything he really wanted to know.

Outside his window, which is as small and thick as the window in one of the old Mercury space capsules, he can see a sky which is not blue but the twilight purple of dusk, although it is the middle of the day. At the point
where the sea and the sky meet, he can see that the horizon-line is slightly bowed.
I am sitting here,
Bill thinks,
a Bloody Mary in my hand and a dirty fat man's elbow poking into my bicep, observing the curvature of the earth.

He smiles a little, thinking that a man who can face something like that shouldn't be afraid of anything. But he
is
afraid, and not just of flying at eighteen miles a minute in this narrow fragile shell. He can almost
feel
Derry rushing at him. And that is exactly the right expression for it. Eighteen miles a minute or not, the sensation is of being perfectly still while Derry rushes at him like some big carnivore which has lain in wait for a long time and has finally broken from cover. Derry, ah, Derry! Shall we write an ode to Derry? The stink of its mills and its rivers? The dignified quiet of its tree-lined streets? The library? The Standpipe? Bassey Park? Derry Elementary School?

The Barrens?

Lights are going on in his head: big kliegs. It's like he's been sitting in a darkened theater for twenty-seven years, waiting for something to happen, and now it's finally begun. The set being revealed spot by spot and klieg by klieg is not, however, some harmless comedy like
Arsenic and Old Lace;
to Bill Denbrough it looks more like
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

All those stories I wrote,
he thinks with a stupid kind of amusement.
All those novels. Derry is where they all came from; Derry was the wellspring. They came from what happened that summer, and from what happened to George the autumn before. All the interviewers that ever asked me THAT QUESTION . . . I gave them the wrong answer.

The fat man's elbow digs into him again, and he spills some of his drink. Bill almost says something, then thinks better of it.

THAT QUESTION, of course, was “Where do you get your ideas?” It was a question Bill supposed all writers of fiction had to answer—or pretend to answer—at least twice a week, but a fellow like him, who made a living by writing of things which never were and never could be, had to answer it—or pretend to—much more often than that.