It (51 page)

The rosebushes, which had been showing the first touches of spring green when Eddie broke through them, now turned a dead and lacy black.

“Blowjob,” the leper whispered, and tottered to its feet.

Eddie raced for his bike. It was the same race as before, only it now had the quality of a nightmare, where you can only move with the most agonizing slowness no matter how hard you try to go fast . . . and in those dreams didn't you always hear or feel something, some It, gaining on you? Didn't you always smell Its stinking breath, as Eddie was smelling it now?

Fo a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really
was
a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . but alive.
Safe.
Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.

He did not try to mount his bike immediately; he ran with it instead, head down, pushing the handlebars. He felt as if he was drowning, not in water but inside his own chest.

“Blowjob,” the leper whispered again. “Come back anytime, Eddie. Bring your friends.”

Its rotting fingers seemed to touch the back of his neck, but perhaps that was only a dangling strand of cobweb from under the porch, caught in his hair and brushing against his shrinking flesh. Eddie leaped onto his bike and pedaled away, not caring that his throat had closed up tight as Tillie again, not giving two sucks for his asthma, not looking back. He didn't look back until he was almost home, and
of course there was nothing behind him when he finally did but two kids headed over to the park to play ball.

That night, lying straight as a poker in bed, one hand folded tightly around his aspirator, looking into the shadows, he heard the leper whisper:
It won't do you any good to run, Eddie.

“Wow,” Richie said respectfully. It was the first thing any of them had said since Bill Denbrough finished his story.

“H-Have you g-g-got a-another suh-suh-higgarette, R-R-Richie?”

Richie gave him the last one in the pack he had hawked almost empty from his dad's desk drawer. He even lit it for Bill.

“You didn't dream it, Bill?” Stan asked suddenly.

Bill shook his head. “N-N-No duh-dream.”

“Real,” Eddie said in a low voice.

Bill looked at him sharply. “Wh-Wh-What?”

“Real, I said.” Eddie looked at him almost resentfully. “It really happened. It was
real.”
And before he could stop himself—before he even knew he was going to do it—Eddie found himself telling the story of the leper that had come crawling out of the basement at 29 Neibolt Street. Halfway through the telling he began to gasp and had to use his aspirator. And at the end he burst into shrill tears, his thin body shaking.

They all looked at him uncomfortably, and then Stan put a hand on his back. Bill gave him an awkward hug while the others glanced away, embarrassed.

“That's a-all right, E-Eddie. It's o-o-okay.”

“I saw it too,” Ben Hanscom said suddenly. His voice was flat and harsh and scared.

Eddie looked up, his face still naked with tears, his eyes red and raw-looking. “What?”

“I saw the clown,” Ben said. “Only he wasn't like you said—at least not when I saw him. He wasn't all gooshy. He was . . . he was dry.” He paused, ducked his head, and looked at his hands, which lay palely on his elephantine thighs. “I think he was the mummy.”

“Like in the movies?” Eddie asked.

“Like that but
not
like that,” Ben said slowly. “In the movies he looks fake. It's scary, but you can tell it's a put-up job, you know? All those bandages, they look too neat, or something. But this guy . . . he looked the way a real mummy would look, I think. If you actually found one in a room under a pyramid, I mean. Except for the suit.”

“Wuh-wuh-wuh-hut suh-hoot?”

Ben looked at Eddie. “A silver suit with big orange buttons down the front.”

Eddie's mouth dropped open. He shut it and said, “If you're kidding, say so. I still . . . I still dream about that guy under the porch.”

“It's not a joke,” Ben said, and began to tell the story. He told it slowly, beginning with his volunteering to help Mrs. Douglas count and store books and ending with his own bad dreams. He spoke slowly, not looking at the others. He spoke as if deeply ashamed of his own behavior. He didn't raise his head again until the story was over.

“You must have dreamed it,” Richie said finally. He saw Ben wince and hurried on: “Now don't take it personal, Big Ben, but you got to see that balloons can't, like, float against the wind—”

“Pictures can't wink, either,” Ben said.

Richie looked from Ben to Bill, troubled. Accusing Ben of dreaming awake was one thing; accusing Bill was something else. Bill was their leader, the guy they all looked up to. No one said so out loud; no one needed to. But Bill was the idea man, the guy who could think of something to do on a boring day, the guy who remembered games the others had forgotten. And in some odd way they all sensed something comfortingly adult about Bill—perhaps it was a sense of accountability, a feeling that Bill would take the responsibility if responsibility needed to be taken. The truth was, Richie believed Bill's story, crazy as it was. And perhaps he didn't want to believe Ben's . . . or Eddie's, for that matter.

“Nothing like that ever happened to you, huh?” Eddie asked Richie.

Richie paused, began to say something, shook his head, paused again, then said: “Scariest thing I've seen lately was Mark Prenderlist takin a leak in McCarron Park. Ugliest hogger you ever saw.”

Ben said, “What about you, Stan?”

“No,” Stan said quickly, and looked somewhere else. His small face was pale, his lips pressed together so tightly they were white.

“W-W-Was there suh-homething, S-St-Stan?” Bill asked.

“No, I told you!” Stan got to his feet and walked to the embankment, hands in his pockets. He stood watching the water course over the top of the original dam and pile up behind the second watergate.

“Come on, now, Stanley!” Richie said in a shrill falsetto. This was another of his Voices: Granny Grunt. When speaking in his Granny Grunt Voice, Richie would hobble around with one fist against the small of his back, and cackle a lot. He still, however, sounded more like Richie Tozier than anyone else.

“Fess up, Stanley, tell your old Granny about the
baaaaad
clown and I'll give you a chocker-chip cookie. You just tell—”

“Shut up!”
Stan yelled suddenly, whirling on Richie, who fell back a step or two, astonished.
“Just shut up!”

“Yowza, boss,” Richie said, and sat down. He looked at Stan Uris mistrustfully. Bright spots of color flamed in Stan's cheeks, but he still looked more scared than mad.

“That's okay,” Eddie said quietly. “Never mind, Stan.”

“It wasn't a clown,” Stanley said. His eyes flicked from one of them to the next to the next to the next. He seemed to struggle with himself.

“Y-Y-You can t-tell,” Bill said, also speaking quietly. “W-We d-d-did.”

“It wasn't a clown. It was—”

Which was when the carrying, whiskey-roughened tones of Mr. Nell interrupted, making them all jump as if they had been shot: “
Jay
-sus Christ on a jumped-up chariot-driven crutch! Look at this mess! Jaysus Christ!”

Richard Tozier turns off the radio, which has been blaring out Madonna's “Like a Virgin” on WZON (a station which declares itself to be “Bangor's AM stereo rocker!” with a kind of hysterical frequency), pulls over to the side of the road, shuts down the engine of the Mustang the Avis people rented him at Bangor International, and gets out. He hears the pull and release of his own breath in his ears. He has seen a sign which has caused the flesh of his back to break out in hard ridges of gooseflesh.

He walks to the front of the car and puts one hand on its hood. He hears the engine ticking softly to itself as it cools. He hears a jay scream briefly and then shut up. There are crickets. And as far as the soundtrack goes, that's it.

He has seen the sign, he passes it, and suddenly he is in Derry again. After twenty-five years Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier has come home. He has—

Burning agony suddenly needles into his eyes, breaking his thought cleanly off. He utters a strangled little shout and his hands fly up to his face. The only time he felt anything even remotely like this burning pain was when he got an eyelash caught under one of his contacts in college—and that was only in one eye. This terrible pain is in both.

Before he can reach even halfway to his face, the pain is gone.

He lowers his hands again slowly, thoughtfully, and looks down Route
7.
He left the turnpike at the Etna-Haven exit, wanting, for some reason he doesn't understand, not to come in by the turnpike, which was still under construction in the Derry area when he and his folks shook the dust of this
weird little town from their heels and headed out for the Midwest. No—the turnpike would have been quicker, but it would have been wrong.

So he had driven along Route 9 through the sleeping nestle of buildings that was Haven Village, then turned off on Route
7.
And as he went the day grew steadily brighter.

Now this sign. It was the same sort of sign which marked the borders of more than six hundred Maine towns, but how this one had squeezed his heart!

Penobscot

County

D

E

R

R

Y

Maine

Beyond that an Elks sign; a Rotary Club sign; and completing the trinity, a sign proclaiming the fact that
DERRY LIONS ROAR FOR THE UNITED FUND
! Past that one there is just Route 7 again, continuing on in a straight line between bulking banks of pine and spruce. In this silent light as the day steadies itself those trees look as dreamy as blue-gray cigarette smoke stacked on the moveless air of a sealed room.

Derry,
he thinks.
Derry, God help me. Derry. Stone the crows.

Here he is on Route 7. Five miles up, if time or tornado has not carried it away in the intervening years, will be the Rhulin Farms, where his mother bought all of their eggs and most of their vegetables. Two miles beyond that Route 7 became Witcham Road and of course Witcham Road eventually became Witcham Street, can you gimme hallelujah world without end amen. And somewhere along there between the Rhulin Farms and town he would drive past the Bowers place and then the Hanlon place. A mile or so after Hanlon's he would see the first glitter of the Kenduskeag and the first spreading tangle of poison green. The lush lowlands that had been known for some reason as the Barrens.

I really don't know if I can face all of that,
Richie thinks.
I mean, let's tell the truth here, folks. I just don't know if I can.

The whole previous night has passed in a dream for him. As long as he continued travelling, moving forward, making miles, the dream went on. But now he has stopped—or rather the sign has stopped him—and he has awakened to a strange truth: the dream was the reality.
Derry
is the reality.

It seems he just cannot stop remembering, he thinks the memories will eventually drive him mad, and now he bites down on his lip and puts his hands together palm to palm, tight, as if to keep himself from flying apart. He feel's that he
will
fly apart, and soon. There seems to be some mad part of him which actually looks forward to what may be coming, but most of him only wonders how he's going to get through the next few days. He—

And now his thoughts break off again.

A deer is walking out into the road. He can hear the light thud of its spring-soft hoofs on the tar.

Richie's breath stops in mid-exhale, then slowly starts again. He looks, dumbfounded, part of him thinking that he never saw anything like
this
on Rodeo Drive. No—he'd needed to come back home to see something like this.

It's a doe (“Doe, a deer, a female deer,” a Voice chants merrily in his head). She's come out of the woods on the right and pauses in the middle of Route 7, front legs on one side of the broken white line, rear legs on the other. Her dark eyes regard Rich Tozier mildly. He reads interest in those eyes but no fear.

He looks at her in wonder, thinking she's an omen or a portent or some sort of Madame Azonka shit like that. And then, quite unexpectedly, a memory of Mr. Nell comes to him. What a start he had given them that day, busting in on them in the wake of Bill's story and Ben's story and Eddie's story! The whole bunch of them had damn near gone up to heaven.

Now, looking at the deer, Rich draws in a deep breath and finds himself speaking in one of his Voices . . . but for the first time in twenty-five years or more it is the Voice of the Irish Cop, one he had incorporated into his repertoire after that memorable day. It comes rolling out of the morning silence like a great big bowling ball—it is louder and bigger than Richie would ever have believed:

‘
Jay
-sus Christ on a jumped-up chariot-driven crutch! What's a nice girrul like you doin out in this wilderness, deer? Jaysus Christ! You be gettin on home before I decide to tell Father O'Staggers on ye!”

Before the echoes have died away, before the first shocked jay can begin scolding him for his sacrilege, the doe flicks her tail at him like a truce flag
and disappears into the smoky-looking firs on the left side of the road, leaving only a small pile of steaming pellets behind to show that, even at thirty-seven, Richie Tozier is still capable of Getting Off A Good One from time to time.