It (80 page)

“It all fits rather too well, doesn't it?” Mike said finally.

“Yes,” Bill said in a low voice. “It fits, all right.”

“I'd kept tabs on the six of you over the years, as I said,” Mike
went on, “but it wasn't until then that I began to understand just why I had been doing it, that it had a real and concrete purpose. Still, I held off, waiting to see how things would develop. You see, I felt that I had to be absolutely sure before I . . . disturbed your lives. Not ninety percent, not even ninety-five percent. One hundred was all that would do it.

“In December of last year, an eight-year-old boy named Steven Johnson was found dead in Memorial Park. Like Adrian Mellon, he had been badly mutilated just before or just after his death, but he looked as if he could have died of just plain fright.”

“Sexually assaulted?” Eddie asked.

“No. Just plain mutilated.”

“How many in all?” Eddie asked, not looking as if he really wanted to know.

“It's bad,” Mike said.

“How many?” Bill repeated.

“Nine. So far.”

“It can't be!” Beverly cried. “I would have read about it in the paper . . . seen it on the news! When that crazy cop killed all those women in Castle Rock, Maine . . . and those children that were murdered in Atlanta . . .”

“Yes, that,” Mike said. “I've thought about that a lot. It's really the closest correlative to what's going on here, and Bev's right: that really was coast-to-coast news. In some ways, the Atlanta comparison is the thing about all of this that frightens me the most. The murder of nine children . . . we should have TV news correspondents here, and phony psychics, and reporters from
The Atlantic Monthly
and
Rolling Stone
 . . . the whole media circus, in short.”

“But it hasn't happened,” Bill said.

“No,” Mike answered, “it hasn't. Oh, there was a Sunday-supplement piece about it in the Portland Sunday
Telegram,
and another one in the Boston
Globe
after the last two. A Boston-based television program called
Good Day!
did a segment this February on unsolved murders, and one of the experts mentioned the Derry murders, but only passingly . . . and he certainly gave no indication of knowing there had been a similar batch of murders in 1957–58, and another in 1929–30.

“There are some ostensible reasons, of course. Atlanta, New York,
Chicago, Detroit . . . those are big media towns, and in big media towns when something happens it makes a bang. There isn't a single TV or radio station in Derry, unless you count the little FM the English and Speech Department runs up at the high school. Bangor's got the corner on the market when it comes to the media.”

“Except for the Derry
News,”
Eddie said, and they all laughed.

“But we all know that doesn't really cut it with the way the world is today. The communication web is there, and at some point the story should have broken nationally. But it didn't. And I think the reason is just this: It doesn't want it to.”

“It,” Bill mused, almost to himself.

“It,” Mike agreed. “If we have to call It something, it might as well be what we used to call It. I've begun to think, you see, that It has been here so long . . . whatever It really is . . . that It's become a part of Derry, something as much a part of the town as the Standpipe, or the Canal, or Bassey Park, or the library. Only It's not a matter of outward geography, you understand. Maybe that was true once, but now It's . . . inside. Somehow It's gotten inside. That's the only way I know to understand all of the terrible things that have happened here—the nominally explicable as well as the utterly inexplicable. There was a fire at a Negro nightclub called the Black Spot in 1930. A year before that, a bunch of half-bright Depression outlaws was gunned down on Canal Street in the middle of the afternoon.”

“The Bradley Gang,” Bill said. “The FBI got them, right?”

“That's what the histories say, but that's not precisely true. So far as I've been able to find out—and I'd give a lot to believe that it wasn't so, because I love this town—the Bradley Gang, all seven of them, were actually gunned down by the good citizens of Derry. I'll tell you about it sometime.

“There was the explosion at the Kitchener Ironworks during an Easter-egg hunt in 1906. There was a horrible series of animal mutilations that same year that was finally traced to Andrew Rhulin, the grand-uncle of the man who now runs the Rhulin Farms. He was apparently bludgeoned to death by the three deputies who were supposed to bring him in. None of the deputies were ever brought to trial.”

Mike Hanlon produced a small notebook from an inner pocket and paged through it, talking without looking up. “In 1877 there were
four lynchings inside the incorporated town limits. One of those that climbed a rope was the lay preacher of the Methodist Church, who apparently drowned all four of his children in the bathtub as if they were kittens and then shot his wife in the head. He put the gun in her hand to make it look like suicide, but no one was fooled. A year before that four loggers were found dead in a cabin downstream on the Kenduskeag, literally torn apart. Disappearances of children, of whole families, are recorded in old diary extracts . . . but not in any public document. It goes on and on, but perhaps you get the idea.”

“I get the idea, all right,” Ben said. “Something's going on here, but it's private.”

Mike closed his notebook, replaced it in his inner pocket, and looked at them soberly.

“If I were an insurance man instead of a librarian, I'd draw you a graph, maybe. It would show an unusually high rate of every violent crime we know of, not excluding rape, incest, breaking and entering, auto theft, child abuse, spouse abuse, assault.

“There's a medium-sized city in Texas where the violent-crime rate is far below what you'd expect for a city of its size and mixed racial make-up. The extraordinary placidity of the people who live there has been traced to something in the water . . . a natural trank of some kind. The exact opposite holds true here. Derry is a violent place to live in an ordinary year. But every twenty-seven years—although the cycle has never been perfectly exact—that violence has escalated to a furious peak . . . and it has
never
been national news.”

“You're saying there's a cancer at work here,” Beverly said.

“Not at all. An untreated cancer invariably kills. Derry hasn't died; on the contrary, it has thrived . . . in an unspectacular, unnewsworthy way, of course. It is simply a fairly prosperous small city in a relatively unpopulous state where bad things happen too often . . . and where ferocious things happen every quarter of a century or so.”

“That holds true all down the line?” Ben asked.

Mike nodded. “All down the line. 1715–16, 1740 until roughly 1743—that must have been a bad one—1769–70, and on and on. Right up to the present time. I have a feeling that it's been getting steadily worse, maybe because there have been more people in Derry at the end of each cycle, maybe for some other reason. And in 1958,
the cycle appears to have come to a premature end. For which we were responsible.”

Bill Denbrough leaned forward, his eyes suddenly bright. “You're sure of that?
Sure?”

“Yes,” Mike said. “All the other cycles reached their peak around September and then ended in a big way. Life usually took on its more or less normal tenor by Christmas . . . Easter at the latest. In other words, there were bad ‘years' of fourteen to twenty months every twenty-seven years. But the bad year that began when your brother was killed in October of 1957 ended quite abruptly in August of 1958.”

“Why?” Eddie asked urgently. His breath had thinned; Bill remembered that high whistle as Eddie inhaled breath, and knew that he would soon be tooting on the old lung-sucker. “What did we
do?”

The question hung there. Mike seemed to regard it . . . and at last he shook his head. “You'll remember,” he said. “In time you'll remember.”

“What if we don't?” Ben asked.

“Then God help us all.”

“Nine children dead this year,” Rich said. “Christ.”

“Lisa Albrecht and Steven Johnson in late 1984,” Mike said. “In February a boy named Dennis Torrio disappeared. A high-school boy. His body was found in mid-March, in the Barrens. Mutilated. This was nearby.”

He took a photograph from the same pocket into which he had replaced the notebook. It made its way around the table. Beverly and Eddie looked at it, puzzled, but Richie Tozier reacted violently. He dropped it as if it were hot. “Jesus! Jesus, Mike!” He looked up, his eyes wide and shocked. A moment later he passed the picture to Bill.

Bill looked at it and felt the world swim into gray tones all around him. For a moment he was sure he would pass out. He heard a groan, and knew he had made the sound. He dropped the picture.

“What is it?” he heard Beverly saying. “What does it mean, Bill?”

“It's my brother's school picture,” Bill said at last. “It's Juh-Georgie. The picture from his album. The one that moved. The one that winked.”

They handed it around again then, while Bill sat as still as stone
at the head of the table, looking out into space. It was a photograph of a photograph. The picture showed a tattered school photo propped up against a white background—smiling lips parted to exhibit two holes where new teeth had never grown
(unless they grow in your coffin.
Bill thought, and shuddered). On the margin below George's picture were the words
SCHOOL FRIENDS
1957–58.

“It was found
this year?”
Beverly asked again. Mike nodded and she turned to Bill. “When did you last see it, Bill?”

He wet his lips, tried to speak. Nothing came out. He tried again, hearing the words echo in his head, aware of the stutter coming back, fighting it, fighting the terror.

“I haven't seen that picture since 1958. That spring, the year after George died. When I tried to show it to Richie, it was g-gone.”

There was an explosive gasping sound that made them all look around. Eddie was setting his aspirator back on the table and looking slightly embarrassed.

“Eddie Kaspbrak blasts off!” Richie cried cheerfully, and then, suddenly and eerily, the Voice of the MovieTone Newsreel Narrator came from Rich's mouth: “Today in Derry, a whole city turns out for Asthmatics on Parade, and the star of the show is Big Ed the Snothead, known all over New England as—”

He stopped abruptly, and one hand moved toward his face, as if to cover his eyes, and Bill suddenly thought:
No—no, that's not it. Not to cover his eyes but to push his glasses up on his nose. The glasses that aren't even there anymore. Oh dear Christ, what's going on here?

“Eddie, I'm sorry,” Rich said. “That was cruel. I don't know what the hell I was thinking about.” He looked around at the others, bewildered.

Mike Hanlon spoke into the silence.

“I'd promised myself after Steven Johnson's body was discovered that if anything else happened—if there was one more clear case—I would make the calls that I ended up not making for another two months. It was as if I was hypnotized by what was happening, by the
consciousness
of it—the
deliberateness
of it. George's picture was found by a fallen log less than ten feet from the Torrio boy's body. It wasn't hidden; quite the contrary. It was as if the killer wanted it to be found. As I'm sure the killer did.”

“How did you get the police photo, Mike?” Ben asked. “That's what it is, isn't it?”

“Yes, that's what it is. There's a fellow in the Police Department who isn't averse to making a little extra money. I pay him twenty bucks a month—all that I can afford. He's a pipeline.

“The body of Dawn Roy was found four days after the Torrio boy. McCarron Park. Thirteen years old. Decapitated.

“April 23rd of this year. Adam Terrault. Sixteen. Reported missing when he didn't come home from band practice. Found the next day just off the path that runs through the greenbelt behind West Broadway. Also decapitated.

“May 6th. Frederick Cowan. Two and a half. Found in an upstairs bathroom, drowned in the toilet.”

“Oh, Mike!” Beverly cried.

“Yeah, it's bad,” he said, almost angrily. “Don't you think I know that?”

“The police are convinced that it couldn't have been—well, some kind of accident?” Bev asked.

Mike shook his head. “His mother was hanging clothes in the back yard. She heard sounds of a struggle—heard her son screaming. She ran as fast as she could. As she went up the stairs, she says she heard the sound of the toilet flushing repeatedly—that, and someone laughing. She said it didn't sound human.”

“And she saw nothing at all?” Eddie asked.

“Her son,” Mike said simply. “His back had been broken, his skull fractured. The glass door of the shower-stall was broken. There was blood everywhere. The mother is in the Bangor Mental Health Institute, now. My. . . . my Police Department source says she's quite lost her mind.”

“No fucking wonder,” Richie said hoarsely. “Who's got a cigarette?”

Beverly gave him one. Rich lit it with hands that shook badly.

“The police line is that the killer came in through the front door while the Cowan boy's mother was hanging her clothes in the back yard. Then, when she ran up the back stairs, he supposedly jumped from the bathroom window into the yard she'd just left and got away clean. But the window is only one of those half-sized jobs; a kid of
seven would have to wriggle to get through it. And the drop was twenty-five feet to a stone-flagged patio. Rademacher doesn't like to talk about those things, and no one in the press—certainly no one at the
News
—has pressed him about them.”