It (116 page)

“Shhh,” Ben said. “Listen.” And, almost sobbing: “You can hear them—Christ, you can hear them in there.”

And in the silence that was only broken by the mild stir of the summer breeze, they all realized they could. The band was playing a martial marching tune, made faint and tinny by distance . . . or the passage of time . . . or whatever it was. The cheering of the crowd was like sounds that might come through on a badly tuned radio station. There were popping noises, also faint, like the muffled sound of snapping fingers.

“Firecrackers,” Beverly whispered, and rubbed at her eyes with hands that shook. “Those are firecrackers, aren't they?”

No one answered. They watched the picture, their eyes eating up their faces.

The parade wiggled its way toward them, but just before the marchers reached the extreme foreground—at the point where it seemed they must march right out of the picture and into a world thirteen years later—they dropped from sight, as if on some kind of unknowable curve. The World War I soldiers first, their faces strangely old under their pie-plate helmets, with their sign which read
THE DERRY VFW WELCOMES HOME OUR BRAVE BOYS
, then the Boy Scouts, the Kiwanians, the Home Nursing Corps, the Derry Christian Marching Band, then the Derry World War II vets themselves, with the high-school band behind them. The crowd moved and shifted. Tickertape and confetti fluttered down from the second- and third-floor windows
of the business buildings that lined the streets. The clown pranced along the sidelines, doing splits and cartwheels, miming a sniper, miming a salute. And Bill noticed for the first time that people were turning from him—but not as if they
saw
him, exactly; it was more as if they felt a draft or smelled something bad.

Only the children really saw him, and they shrank away.

Ben stretched his hand out to the picture, as Bill had done in George's room.

“Nuh-Nuh-Nuh-NO!” Bill cried.

“I think it's all right, Bill,” Ben said. “Look.” And he laid his hand on the protective plastic over the picture for a moment and then took it back. “But if you stripped off that cover—”

Beverly screamed. The clown had left off its antics when Ben withdrew his hand. It rushed toward them, its paint-bloody mouth gibbering and laughing. Bill winced back but held onto the book all the same, thinking it would drop out of sight as the parade had done, and the marching band, and the Boy Scouts, and the Cadillac convertible carrying Miss Derry of 1945.

But the clown did not disappear along that curve that seemed to define the edge of that old existence. Instead, it leaped with a scary, nimble grace onto a lamppost that stood in the extreme left foreground of the picture. It shinnied up like a monkey on a stick—and suddenly its face was pressed against the tough plastic sheet Will Hanlon had put over each of the pages in his book. Beverly screamed again and this time Eddie joined her, although his scream was faint and blue-breathless. The plastic bulged out—later they would all agree they saw it. Bill saw the bulb of the clown's red nose flatten, the way your nose will flatten when you press it against a windowpane.

“Kill you all!”
The clown was laughing and screaming.
“Try to stop me and I'll kill you all! Drive you crazy and then kill you all! You can't stop me! I'm the Gingerbread Man! I'm the Teenage Werewolf!”

And for a moment It
was
the Teenage Werewolf, the moon-silvered face of the lycanthrope peering out at them from over the collar of the silver suit, white teeth bared.

“Can't stop me, I'm the leper!”

Now the leper's face, haunted and peeling, rotting with sores, stared at them with the eyes of the living dead.

“Can't top me, I'm the mummy!”

The leper's face aged and ran with sterile cracks. Ancient bandages swam halfway out of its skin and solidified there. Ben turned away, his face as white as curds, one hand plastered over his neck and ear.

“Can't stop me, I'm the dead boys!”

“No!”
Stan Uris screamed. His eyes bulged above bruised-looking crescents of skin—
shockflesh,
Bill thought randomly, and it was a word he would use in a novel twelve years later, with no idea where it had come from, simply taking it, as writers take the right word at the right time, as a simple gift from that outer space

(otherspace)

where the good words come from sometimes.

Stan snatched the album from his hands and slammed it shut. He held it closed with both hands, the tendons standing out along the inner surfaces of his wrists and forearms. He looked around at the others with eyes that were nearly insane. “No,” he said rapidly. “No, no, no.”

And suddenly Bill found he was more concerned with Stan's repeated denials than with the clown, and he understood that this was exactly the sort of reaction the clown had hoped to provoke, because . . .

Because maybe It's scared of us . . . really scared for the first time in Its long, long life.

He grabbed Stan and shook him twice, hard, holding onto his shoulders. Stan's teeth clicked together and he dropped the album. Mike picked it up and put it aside in a hurry, not liking to touch it after what he had seen. But it was still his father's, and he understood intuitively that his father would never see in it what he had just seen.

“No,” Stan said softly.

“Yes,” Bill said.

“No,” Stan said again.

“Yes.
We a-a-all—”

“No.”

“—a-a-all suh-haw it, Stan,” Bill said. He looked at the others.

“Yes,” Ben said.

“Yes,” Richie said.

“Yes,” Mike said. “Oh my God, yes.”

“Yes,” Bev said.

“Yes,” Eddie managed, gasping it out of his rapidly closing throat.

Bill looked at Stan, demanding with his eyes that Stan look back at him. “Duh-don't let it g-g-get y-you, man,” Bill said. “Yuh-you suh-saw it, t-t-too.”

“I didn't want to!”
Stan wailed. Sweat stood out on his brow in an oily sheen.

“But y-y-you
duh-duh-did.”

Stan looked at the others, one by one. He ran his hands through his short hair and fetched up a great, shuddering sigh. His eyes seemed to clear of that lowering madness that had so disturbed Bill.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Okay. Yes. That what you want? Yes.”

Bill thought:
We're still all together. It didn't stop us. We can still kill It. We can still kill It . . . if we're brave.

Bill looked around at the others and saw in each pair of eyes some measure of Stan's hysteria. Not quite as bad, but there.

“Y-Y-Yeah,” he said, and smiled at Stan. After a moment Stan smiled back and some of that horrible shocked look left his face. “That's what I wuh-wuh-wanted, you weh-weh-wet end.”

“Beep-beep, Dumbo,” Stan said, and they all laughed. It was hysterical screaming laughter, but better than no laughter at all, Bill reckoned.

“C-C-Come on,” he said, because someone had to say something. “Let's f-f-finish the clubhouse. What do you s-s-say?”

He saw the gratitude in their eyes and felt a measure of gladness for them . . . but their gratitude did little to heal his own horror. In fact, there was something in their gratitude which made him want to hate them. Would he never be able to express his own terror, lest the fragile welds that made them into one thing should let go? And even to think such a thing wasn't really fair, was it? Because in some measure at least he was using them—using his friends, risking their lives—to settle the score for his dead brother. And was even that the bottom? No, because George was dead, and if revenge could be exacted at all, Bill suspected it could only be exacted on behalf of the living. And what did that make him? A selfish little shit waving a tin sword and trying to make himself look like King Arthur?

Oh Christ,
he groaned to himself,
if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up.

His resolve was still strong, but it was a bitter resolve.

Bitter.

Richie Tozier pushes his glasses up on his nose (already the gesture feels perfectly familiar, although he has worn contact lenses for twenty years) and thinks with some amazement that the atmosphere has changed in the room while Mike recalled the incident with the bird out at the Ironworks and reminded them about his father's photograph album and the picture that had moved.

Richie had felt a mad, exhilarating kind of energy growing in the room. He had done cocaine nine or ten times over the last couple of years—at parties, mostly; coke wasn't something you wanted just lying around your house if you were a bigga-time disc jockey—and the feel was something like that, but not exactly. This feeling was purer, more of a mainline high. He thought he recognized the feeling from his childhood, when he had felt it every day and had come to take it merely as a matter of course. He supposed that, if he had ever thought about that deep-running aquifer of energy as a kid (he could not recall that he ever had), he would have simply dismissed it as a fact of life, something that would always be there, like the color of his eyes or his disgusting hammertoes.

Well, that hadn't turned out to be true. The energy you drew on so extravagantly when you were a kid, the energy you thought would never exhaust itself—that slipped away somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, to be replaced by something much duller, something as bogus as a coke high: purpose, maybe, or goals, or whatever rah-rah Junior Chamber of Commerce word you wanted to use. It was no big deal; it didn't go all at once, with a bang. And maybe, Richie thought, that's the scary part. How you don't stop being a kid all at once, with a big explosive bang, like one of that clown's trick balloons
with the Burma-Shave slogans on the sides. The kid in you just leaked out, like the air out of a tire. And one day you looked in the mirror and there was a grownup looking back at you. You could go on wearing bluejeans, you could keep going to Springsteen and Seger concerts, you could dye your hair, but that was a grownup's face in the mirror just the same. It all happened while you were asleep, maybe, like a visit from the Tooth Fairy.

No,
he thinks.
Not the Tooth Fairy. The
Age
Fairy.

He laughs aloud at the stupid extravagance of this image, and when Beverly looks at him questioningly, he waves a hand at her. “Nothing, babe,” he says. “Just thinkin me thinks.”

But now that energy is back. No, not all the way back—not yet, anyway—but coming back. And it's not just him; he can feel it filling the room. Mike looks okay to Richie for the first time since they all got together for that hideous lunch out by the mall. When Richie walked into the lobby and saw Mike sitting there with Ben and Eddie, he thought, shocked:
There's a man who's going crazy, getting ready to commit suicide, maybe.
But that look is gone now. Not just sublimated; gone. Richie has sat right here and watched the last of it slip out of Mike's face while he relived the experience of the bird and the album. He's been energized. And it is the same with all of them. It's in their faces, their voices, their gestures.

Eddie pours himself another gin-and-prune-juice. Bill knocks back some bourbon, and Mike cracks another beer. Beverly glances up at the balloons Bill has tethered to the microfilm recorder at the main desk and finishes her third screwdriver in a hurry. They have all been drinking pretty enthusiastically, but none of them are drunk. Richie doesn't know where that energy he feels is coming from, but it's not out of a liquor bottle.

DERRY NIGGERS GET THE BIRD
: Blue.

THE LOSERS ARE STILL LOSING, BUT STANLEY URIS IS FINALLY AHEAD
: Orange.

Christ,
Richie thinks, opening a fresh beer for himself.
It isn't bad enough It can be any damn monster It wants to be, and it isn't bad enough that It can feed off our fears. It also turns out to be Rodney Dangerfield in drag.

It's Eddie who breaks the silence. “How much do you think It knows about what we're doing now?” he asks.

“It was here, wasn't It?” Ben says.

“I'm not sure that means much,” Eddie replies.

Bill nods. “Those are just images,” he says. “I'm not sure that means It
can see us, or know what we're up to. You can see a news commentator on TV, but he can't see you.”

“Those balloons aren't just images,” Beverly says, and jerks a thumb over her shoulder at them. “They're
real.”

“That's not true, though,” Richie says, and they all look at him. “Images
are
real. Sure they are. They—”

And suddenly something else clicks into place, something new: it clicks into place with such firm force that he actually puts his hands to his ears. His eyes widen behind his glasses.

“Oh my God!” he cries suddenly. He gropes for the table, half-stands, then falls back into his chair with a boneless thud. He knocks his can of beer over reaching for it, picks it up, and drinks what's left. He looks at Mike while the others look at him, startled and concerned.

“The burning!” he almost shouts, “The burning in my eyes! Mike! The burning in my eyes—”

Mike is nodding, smiling a little.

“R-Richie?” Bill asks. “What i-is it?”

But Richie barely hears him. The force of the memory sweeps through him like a tide, turning him alternately hot and cold, and he suddenly understands why these memories have come back one at a time. If he had remembered everything at once, the force would have been like a psychological shotgun blast let off an inch from his temple. It would have torn off the whole top of his head.