It (140 page)

“Keel you, senhorrita,” Richie agreed, “but she weel keel you
slow.”

“Beep-beep, Richie.”

Bill was looking at her gravely.

“I'll return your shirt, Bill.”

He nodded and waved a hand to show that this wasn't important.

“Will you get in trouble? Coming home without it?”

“N-No. They h-h-hardly nuh-hotice when I'm a-a-around, anyway.”

She nodded, bit her full underlip, a girl of eleven who was tall for her age and simply beautiful.

“What happens next, Bill?”

“I d-d-don't nuh-nuh-know.”

“It's not over, is it?”

Bill shook his head.

Ben said, “It'll want us more than ever now.”

“More silver slugs?” she asked him. He found he could barely stand to meet her glance.
I love you, Beverly . . . just let me have that. You can have Bill, or the world, or whatever you need. Just let me have that, let me go on loving you, and I guess it'll be enough.

“I don't know,” Ben said. “We could, but . . .” He trailed off vaguely, shrugged. He could not say what he felt, was somehow not able to bring it out—that this was like being in a monster movie, but it wasn't. The mummy had looked different in some ways . . . ways that confirmed its essential reality. The same was true of the Werewolf—he could testify to that because he had seen it in a paralyzing close-up no film, not even one in 3-D, allowed, he had had his hands in the wiry underbrush of Its tangled pelt, he had seen a small, baleful-orange firespot (like a pompom!) in one of Its green eyes. These things were . . . well . . . they were dreams-made-real. And once dreams became real, they escaped the power of the dreamer and became their own deadly things, capable of independent action. The silver slugs had worked because the seven of them had been unified in their belief that they would. But they hadn't killed It. And next time It would approach them in a new shape, one over which silver wielded no power.

Power, power,
Ben thought, looking at Beverly. It was okay now; her eyes had met Bill's again and they were looking at each other as if lost. It was only for a moment, but to Ben it seemed very long.

It always comes back to power. I love Beverly Marsh and she has power over me. She loves Bill Denbrough and so he has power over her. But—I think—he is coming to love her. Maybe it was her face, how it looked when she said she couldn't help being a girl. Maybe it was seeing one breast for just a second. Maybe just the way she looks sometimes when the light is right, or her eyes. Doesn't matter. But if he's starting to love her, she's starting to have power over him. Superman has power, except when there's Kryptonite around. Batman has power, even though he can't fly or see through walls. My mom has power over me, and her boss down in the mill has power over her. Everyone has some . . . except maybe for little kids and babies.

Then he thought that even little kids and babies had power; they could cry until you had to do something to shut them up.

“Ben?” Beverly asked, looking back at him. “Cat got your tongue?”

“Huh? No. I was thinking about power. The power of the slugs.”

Bill was looking at him closely.

“I was wondering where that power came from,” Ben said.

“Ih-Ih-It—” Bill began, and then shut his mouth. A thoughtful expression drifted over his face.

“I really have to go,” Beverly said. “I'll see you all, huh?”

“Sure, come on down tomorrow,” Stan said. “We're going to break Eddie's other arm.”

They all laughed. Eddie pretended to throw his aspirator at Stan.

“Bye, then,” Beverly said, and boosted herself up and out.

Ben looked at Bill and saw that he hadn't joined in the laughter. That thoughtful expression was still on his face, and Ben knew you would have to call his name two or three times before he would answer. He knew what Bill was thinking about; he would be thinking about it himself in the days ahead. Not all the time, no. There would be clothes to hang out and take in for his mother, games of tag and guns in the Barrens, and, during a rainy spell the first four days of August, the seven of them would go on a mad Parcheesi jag at Richie Tozier's house, making blockades, sending each other back with great abandon, deliberating exactly how to split the roll of the dice while rain dripped and ran outside. His mother would announce to him that she believed Pat Nixon was the prettiest woman in America, and be horror-struck when Ben opted for Marilyn Monroe (except for the color of her hair, he thought that Bev looked like Marilyn Monroe). There would be time to eat as many Twinkies and Ring-Dings and Devil Dogs as he could get his hands on, and time to sit on the back porch reading
Lucky Starr and the Moons of Mercury.
There would be time for all of those things while the wound on his chest and belly healed to a scab and began to itch, because life went on and at eleven, although bright and apt, he held no real sense of perspective. He could live with what had happened in the house on Neibolt Street. The world was, after all, full of wonders.

But there would be odd moments of time when he pulled the questions out again and examined them:
The power of the silver, the power of the slugs—where does power like that come from? Where does
any
power come from? How do you get it? How do you use it?

It seemed to him that their lives might depend on those questions. One night as he was falling asleep, the rain a steady lulling patter on the roof and against the windows, it occurred to him that there was another question, perhaps the
only
question.
It
had some real shape; he had nearly seen It. To see the shape was to see the secret. Was that also true of power? Perhaps it was. For wasn't it true that power, like
It, was a shape-changer? It was a baby crying in the middle of the night, it was an atomic bomb, it was a silver slug, it was the way Beverly looked at Bill and the way Bill looked back.

What, exactly what,
was
power, anyway?

Nothing much happened for the next two weeks.

DERRY:

THE FOURTH

INTERLUDE

“You got to lose

You can't win all the time.

You got to lose

You can't win all the time, what'd I say?

I know, pretty baby,

I see trouble comin down the line.”

—John Lee Hooker, “You Got to Lose”

April 6th, 1985

Tell you what, friends and neighbors—I'm drunk tonight. Fuck-drunk. Rye whiskey. Went down to Wally's and got started, went to the greenfront down on Center Street half an hour before they closed and bought a fifth of rye. I know what I'm up to. Drink cheap tonight, pay dear tomorrow. So here he sits, one drunk nigger in a public library after closing, with this book open in front of me and the bottle of Old Kentucky on my left. “Tell the truth and shame the devil,” my mom used to say, but she forgot to tell me that sometimes you can't shame Mr. Splitfoot sober. The Irish know, but of course they're God's white niggers and who knows, maybe they're a step ahead.

Want to write about drink and the devil. Remember
Treasure Island?
The old seadog at the Admiral Benbow. “We'll do 'em yet, Jacky!” I bet the bitter old fuck even believed it. Full of rum—or rye—you can believe anything.

Drink and the devil. Okay.

Amuses me sometimes to think how long I'd last if I actually published some of this stuff I write in the dead of night. If I flashed some of the skeletons in Derry's closet. There is a library Board of Directors. Eleven of them. One is a seventy-year-old writer who suffered a stroke two years ago and who now often needs help to find his place on each meeting's printed agenda (and who has sometimes been observed picking large dry boogers out of his hairy nostrils and placing them carefully in his ear, as if for safe-keeping). Another is a pushy woman who came here from New York with her doctor husband and who talks in a constant, whiny monologue about how provincial Derry is, how no one here understands
THE JEWISH EXPERIENCE
and how one has to go to Boston to buy a skirt one would care to be seen in. Last time this anorexic babe spoke to me without the services of
an intermediary was during the Board's Christmas party about a year and a half ago. She had consumed a pretty large amount of gin, and asked me if anyone in Derry understood
THE BLACK EXPERIENCE
. I had also consumed a pretty large amount of gin, and answered: “Mrs. Gladry, Jews may be a great mystery, but niggers are understood the whole world round.” She choked on her drink, turned around so sharply that her panties were momentarily visible under her flaring skirt (not a very interesting view; would that it had been Carole Danner!), and so ended my last informal conversation with Mrs. Ruth Gladry. No great loss.

The other members of the Board are the descendants of the lumber barons. Their support of the library is an act of inherited expiation: they raped the woods and now care for these books the way a libertine might decide, in his middle age, to provide for the gaily gotten bastards of his youth. It was their grandfathers and great-grandfathers who actually spread the legs of the forests north of Derry and Bangor and raped those green-gowned virgins with their axes and peaveys. They cut and slashed and strip-timbered and never looked back. They tore the hymen of those great forests open when Grover Cleveland was President and had pretty well finished the job by the time Woodrow Wilson had his stroke. These lace-ruffled ruffians raped the great woods, impregnated them with a litter of slash and junk spruce, and changed Derry from a sleepy little ship-building town into a booming honky-tonk where the ginmills never closed and the whores turned tricks all night long. One old campaigner, Egbert Thoroughgood, now ninety-three, told me of taking a slat-thin prostitute in a crib on Baker Street (a street which no longer exists; middle-class apartment housing stands quietly where Baker Street once boiled and brawled).

“I only realized after I spent m'spunk in her that she was laying in a pool of jizzum maybe an inch deep. Stuff had just about gone to jelly. ‘Girl,' I says, ‘ain't you never cared for y'self?' She looks down and says, ‘I'll put on a new sheet if you want to go again. There's two in the cu'bud down the hall, I think. I knows pretty much what I'm layin in until nine or ten, but by midnight my cunt's so numb it might's well be in Ellsworth.' ”

So that was Derry right through the first twenty or so years of the twentieth century: all boom and booze and balling. The Penobscot
and the Kenduskeag were full of floating logs from ice-out in April to ice-in in November. The business began to slack off in the twenties without the Great War or the hardwoods to feed it, and it staggered to a stop during the Depression. The lumber barons put their money in those New York or Boston banks that had survived the Crash and left Derry's economy to live—or die—on its own. They retreated to their gracious houses on West Broadway and sent their children to private schools in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York. And lived on their interest and political connections.

What's left of their supremacy seventy-some years after Egbert Thoroughgood spent his love with a dollar whore in a spermy Baker Street bed are empty wildwoods in Penobscot and Aroostook Counties and the great Victorian houses which stand for two blocks along West Broadway . . . and my library, of course. Except those good folks from West Broadway would take “my library” away from me in jig time (pun
definitely
intended) if I published anything about the Legion of Decency, the fire at the Black Spot, the execution of the Bradley Gang . . . or the affair of Claude Heroux and the Silver Dollar.

The Silver Dollar was a beerjoint, and what may have been the queerest mass murder in the entire history of America took place there in September of 1905. There are still a few old-timers in Derry who claim to remember it, but the only account that I really trust is Thoroughgood's. He was eighteen when it happened.

Thoroughgood now lives in the Paulson Nursing Home. He's toothless, and his Saint John's Valley Franco/Downeast accent is so thick that probably only another old Mainer could understand what he was saying if his talk were written down phonetically. Sandy Ives, the folklorist from the University of Maine whom I have mentioned previously in these wild pages, helped me to translate my audio tapes.

Claude Heroux was, according to Thoroughgood, “Un bat Cannuck sonofawhore widdin eye that'd roll adju like a mart's in dem oonlight.”

(Translation: “One bad Canuck son of a whore with an eye that would roll at you like a mare's in the moonlight.”)

Thoroughgood said that he—and everyone else who had worked with Heroux—believed the man was as sly as a chicken-stealing dog . . . which made his hatchet-wielding foray into the Silver Dollar
all the more startling. It was not in character. Up until then, lumbermen in Derry had believed Heroux's talents ran more to lighting fires in the woods.