It (57 page)

“Maybe he already went in.”

“He said he didn't have any money. And the Daughter of Frankenstein there would never let him in without a ticket.” Richie cocked a thumb at Mrs. Cole, who had been the ticket-taker at the Aladdin since a time well before the pictures had begun to talk. Her hair, dyed a bright red, was so thin you could see her scalp beneath. She had enormous hanging lips which she painted with plum-colored lipstick. Wild blotches of rouge covered her cheeks. Her eyebrows were drawn on in black pencil. Mrs. Cole was a perfect democrat. She hated all kids equally.

“Boy, I don't wanna go in without him but the show's gonna start,” Richie said. “Where in heck is he?”

“You can buy him a ticket and leave it at the box-office,” Bev said, reasonably enough. “Then when he comes—”

But just then Ben came around the corner of Center and Macklin Streets. He was puffing, and his belly joggled beneath his sweatshirt. He saw Richie and raised one hand to wave. Then he saw Bev and his hand stopped in mid-flap. His eyes widened momentarily. He finished his wave and then walked slowly to where they stood under the Aladdin's marquee.

“Hi, Richie,” he said, and then looked at Bev briefly. It was as if he was afraid that an overlong look might result in a flash burn. “Hi, Bev.”

“Hello, Ben,” she said, and a strange silence fell between the two
of them—it was not precisely awkward; it was, Richie thought, almost
powerful.
And he felt a vague twinge of jealousy, because something had passed between them and whatever it had been, he had been excluded from it.

“Howdy, Haystack!” he said. “Thought you went chicken on me. These movies goan scare ten pounds off your pudgy body. Ah say, Ah say they goan turn your hair white, boy. When you come out of this theater, you goan need an usher to help you up the aisle, you goan be shakin so bad.”

Richie started for the box-office and Ben touched his arm. Ben started to speak, glanced at Bev, who was smiling at him, and had to start over again. “I was here,” he said, “but I went up the street and around the corner when those guys came along.”

“What guys?” Richie asked, but he thought he already knew.

“Henry Bowers. Victor Criss. Belch Huggins. Some other guys, too.”

Richie whistled. “They must have already gone inside the theater. I don't see em buying candy.”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

“If I was them, I wouldn't bother paying to see a couple of horror movies,” Richie said. “I'd just stay home and look in a mirror. Save some bread.”

Bev laughed merrily at that, but Ben only smiled a little. Henry Bowers had maybe only started out to hurt him that day last week, but he had ended up meaning to kill him. Ben was quite sure of that.

“Tell you what,” Richie said. “We'll go up in the balcony. They'll all be sittin down in the second or third row with their feet up.”

“You positive?” Ben asked. He was not at all sure Richie understood what bad news those kids were . . . Henry, of course, being the worst news of all.

Richie, who had barely escaped what might have been a really bad beating at the hands of Henry and his spasmoid friends three months ago (he had managed to elude them in the toy department of Freese's Department Store, of all places), understood more about Henry and his merry crew than Ben thought he did.

“If I wasn't fairly positive, I wouldn't go in,” he said. “I want to see those movies, Haystack, but I don't want to, like,
die
for em.”

“Besides, if they give us any trouble, we'll just tell Foxy to kick
them out,” Bev said. Foxy was Mr. Foxworth, the thin, sallow, glum-looking man who managed the Aladdin. He was now selling candy and popcorn, chanting his litany of “Wait your turn, wait your turn, wait your turn.” In his threadbare tux and yellowing boiled shirt he looked like an undertaker who had fallen on hard times.

Ben looked doubtfully from Bev to Foxy to Richie.

“You can't let em run your life, man,” Richie said softly. “Don't you know that?”

“I guess so,” Ben said, and sighed. Actually, he knew no such thing . . . but Beverly's being here had given the equation a crazy skew. If she hadn't come, he would have tried to persuade Richie to go to the movies another day. And if Richie had persisted, Ben might have bowed out. But Bev
was
here. He didn't want to look like a chicken in front of her. And the thought of being with her, in the balcony, in the dark (even if Richie was between them, as he probably would be), was a powerful attraction.

“We'll wait until the show starts before we go in,” Richie said. He grinned and punched Ben on the arm. “Shit, Haystack, you wanna live forever?”

Ben's brows drew together, and then he snorted laughter. Richie also laughed. Looking at them, Beverly laughed, too.

Richie approached the ticket booth again. Liver Lips Cole looked at him sourly.

“Good ahfternyoon, deah lady,” Richie said in his best Baron Butthole Voice. “I am in diah need of three tickey-tickies to youah deah old American flicktoons.”

“Cut the crap and tell me what you want, kid!” Liver Lips barked through the round hole cut in the glass, and something about the way her painted eyebrows were going up and down unsettled Richie so much that he simply pushed a rumpled dollar through the slot and muttered, “Three, please.”

Three tickets popped out of the slot. Richie took them. Liver Lips rammed a quarter back at him. “Don't be smart, don't throw popcorn boxes, don't holler, don't run in the lobby, don't run in the aisles.”

“No, ma'am,” Richie said, backing away to where Ben and Bev stood. He said to them, “It always warms my heart to see an old fart like that who really likes kids.”

They stood outside awhile longer, waiting for the show to start.
Liver Lips glared at them suspiciously from her glass cage. Richie regaled Bev with the story of the dam in the Barrens, trumpeting Mr. Nell's lines in his new Irish Cop Voice. Beverly was giggling before long, laughing hard not long after that. Even Ben was grinning a little, although his eyes kept shifting either toward the Aladdin's glass doors or to Beverly's face.

The balcony was okay. During the first reel of
I Was a Teenage Frankenstein
Richie spotted Henry Bowers and his shitkicking friends. They were down in the second row, just as he had figured they would be. There were five or six of them in all—fifth-, sixth-, and seventhgraders, all of them with their motorhuckle boots cocked up on the seats in front of them. Foxy would come down and tell them to put their feet on the floor. They would. Foxy would leave. Up went the motorhuckle boots again as soon as he did. Five or ten minutes later Foxy would return and the entire charade would be acted out again. Foxy didn't quite have the guts to kick them out and they knew it.

The movies were great. The Teenage Frankenstein was suitably gross. The Teenage Werewolf was somehow scarier, though . . . perhaps because he also seemed a little sad. What had happened wasn't his own fault. There was this hypnotist who had fucked him up, but the only reason he'd been able to was that the kid who turned into the werewolf was full of anger and bad feelings. Richie found himself wondering if there were many people in the world hiding bad feelings like that. Henry Bowers was just overflowing with bad feelings, but he sure didn't bother hiding them.

Beverly sat between the boys, ate popcorn from their boxes, screamed, covered her eyes, sometimes laughed. When the Werewolf was stalking the girl doing exercises in the gym after school, she pressed her face against Ben's arm, and Richie heard Ben's gasp of surprise even over the screams of the two hundred kids below them.

The Werewolf was finally killed. In the last scene one cop solemnly told another that this should teach people not to fiddle with things best left to God. The curtain came down and the lights came up. There was applause. Richie felt totally satisfied, if a little headachy.
He'd probably have to go to the eye-doctor pretty soon and get his lenses changed again. He really would be wearing Coke bottles on his eyes by the time he got to high school, he thought glumly.

Ben twitched at his sleeve. “They saw us, Richie,” he said in a dry, dismayed voice.

“Huh?”

“Bowers and Criss. They looked up here on their way out. They
saw
us!”

“Okay, okay,” Richie said. “Calm down, Haystack. Just
caaalm
down. We'll go out the side door. Nothing to worry about.”

They went down the stairs, Richie in the lead, Beverly in the middle, Ben bringing up the rear and looking back over his shoulder every two steps or so.

“Have those guys really got it in for you, Ben?” Beverly asked.

“Yeah, I guess they do,” Ben said. “I got in a fight with Henry Bowers on the last day of school.”

“Did he beat you up?”

“Not as much as he wanted to,” Ben said. “That's why he's still mad, I guess.”

“Ole Hank the Tank also lost a fair amount of skin,” Richie murmured. “Or so I heard. I don't think he was very pleased about that, either.” He pushed open the exit door and the three of them' stepped out into the alley that ran between the Aladdin and Nan's Luncheonette. A cat which had been rooting in a garbage can hissed and ran past them down the alley, which was blocked at the far end by a board fence. The cat scrambled up and over. A trashcan lid clattered. Bev jumped, grabbed Richie's arm, and then laughed nervously. “I guess I'm still scared from the movies,” she said.

“You won't—” Richie began.

“Hello, fuckface,” Henry Bowers said from behind them.

Startled, the three of them turned around. Henry, Victor, and Belch were standing at the mouth of the alley. There were two other guys behind them.

“Oh
shit,
I knew this was going to happen,” Ben moaned.

Richie turned quickly back toward the Aladdin, but the exit door had closed behind them and there was no way to open it from the outside.

“Say goodbye, fuckface,” Henry said, and suddenly ran at Ben.

The things that happened next seemed to Richie both then and later like something out of a movie—such things simply did not happen in real life. In real life the little kids took their beatings, picked up their teeth and went home.

It didn't happen that way this time.

Beverly stepped forward and to one side, almost as if she intended to meet Henry, perhaps shake his hand. Richie could hear the cleats on his boots rapping. Victor and Belch were coming after him; the other two boys stood at the mouth of the alley, guarding it.

“Leave him alone!” Beverly shouted. “Pick on someone your own size!”

“He's as big as a fucking Mack truck, bitch,” Henry, no gentleman, snarled. “Now get out of my—”

Richie stuck out his foot. He didn't think he meant to. His foot went out the same way wisecracks dangerous to his health sometimes emerged, all on their own, from his mouth. Henry ran into it and fell forward. The brick surface of the alley was slippery with spilled garbage from the overflowing cans on the luncheonette side. Henry went skidding like a shuffleboard weight.

He started to get up, his shirt blotched with coffee grounds, mud, and bits of lettuce.
“Oh you guys are gonna DIE!”
he screamed.

Until this moment Ben had been terrified. Now something in him snapped. He let out a roar and grabbed one of the garbage cans. For just a moment, holding it up, garbage spilling everywhere, he really
did
look like Haystack Calhoun. His face was pale and furious. He threw the garbage can. It struck Henry in the small of the back and knocked him flat again.

“Let's get out of here!” Richie screamed.

They ran toward the mouth of the alley. Victor Criss jumped in front of them. Bellowing, Ben lowered his head and rammed it into Victor's middle.
“Woof!”
Victor grunted, and sat down.

Belch grabbed a handful of Beverly's pony-tail and whipped her smartly against the Aladdin's brick wall. Beverly bounced off and ran down the alley, rubbing her arm. Richie ran after her, grabbing a garbage-can lid on the way. Belch Huggins swung a fist almost the size of a Daisy ham at him. Richie pistoned out the galvanized steel lid. Belch's fist met it. There was a loud
bonnngg!—
a sound that was
almost mellow. Richie felt the shock travel all the way up his arm to the shoulder. Belch screamed and began to hop up and down, holding his swelling hand.

“Yondah lies da tent of my faddah,” Richie said confidentially, doing a very passable Tony Curtis Voice, and then ran after Ben and Beverly.

One of the boys at the mouth of the alley had caught Beverly. Ben was tussling with him. The other boy began to rabbit-punch Ben in the small of the back. Richie swung his foot. It connected with the rabbit-puncher's buttocks. The boy howled with pain. Richie grabbed Beverly's arm in one hand, Ben's in the other.

“Run!”
he shouted.

The boy Ben had been tussling with let go of Beverly and looped a punch at Richie. His ear exploded with momentary pain, then went numb and became very warm. A high whistling sound began to whine in his head. It sounded like the noise you were supposed to listen for when the school nurse put the earphones on you to test your hearing.

They ran down Center Street. People turned to look at them. Ben's large stomach pogoed up and down. Beverly's pony-tail bounced. Richie let go of Ben and held his glasses against his forehead with his left thumb so he wouldn't lose them. His head was still ringing and he believed his ear was going to swell, but he felt wonderful. He started laughing. Beverly joined him. Soon Ben was laughing, too.

They cut up Court Street and collapsed on a bench in front of the police station: at that moment it seemed the only place in Derry where they might possibly be safe. Beverly looped an arm around Ben's neck and Richie's. She gave them a furious hug.