It (95 page)

But one blink did it as one blink always had. The sharp and defined world, where colors stayed inside the lines and where faces that you saw were clear and obvious, simply fell away. Wide bands of pastel fuzz took their place. And although he and the high-school girl, who was both helpful and concerned, searched the paving of the sidewalk for almost fifteen minutes, neither could find even a single lens.

In the back of his head Richie seemed to hear the clown laughing.

Bill did not see Pennywise that afternoon—but he
did
see a ghost. A real ghost. So Bill believed then, and no subsequent event caused him to change his mind.

He had walked up Witcham Street and paused for some time by the drain where George met his end on that rainy October day in 1957. He squatted down and peered into the drain, which was cut into the stonework of the curbing. His heart was beating hard, but he looked anyway.

“Come out, why don't you,” he said in a low voice, and he had the not-quite-mad idea that his voice was floating along dark and dripping passageways, not dying out but continuing onward and onward, feeding on its own echoes, bouncing off moss-covered stone walls and long-dead machinery. He felt it float over still and sullen waters and perhaps issue softly from a hundred different drains in other parts of the city at the same time.

“Come out of there or we'll come in and g-get you.”

He waited nervily for a response, crouched down with his hands between his thighs like a catcher between pitches. There was no response.

He was about to stand up when a shadow fell over him.

Bill looked up sharply, eagerly, ready for anything . . . but it was only a little kid, maybe ten, maybe eleven. He was wearing faded Boy
Scout shorts which displayed his scabby knees to good advantage. He had a Freeze-Pop in one hand and a Fiberglas skateboard which looked almost as battered as his knees in the other. The Freeze-Pop was a fluorescent orange. The skateboard was a fluorescent green.

“You always talk into the sewers, mister?” the boy asked.

“Only in Derry,” Bill said.

They looked at each other solemnly for a moment and then burst into laughter at the same time.

“I want to ask you a stupid queh-question,” Bill said.

“Okay,” the kid said.

“You ever h-hear anything down in one of these?”

The kid looked at Bill as though he had flipped out.

“O-Okay,” Bill said, “forget I a-asked.”

He started to walk away and had gotten maybe twelve steps—he was headed up the hill, vaguely thinking he would take a look at the home place—when the kid called, “Mister?”

Bill turned back. He had his sportcoat hooked on his finger and slung over his shoulder. His collar was unbuttoned, his tie loosened. The boy was watching him carefully, as if already regretting his decision to speak further. Then he shrugged, as if saying
Oh what the hell.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“What did it say?”

“I don't know. It talked some foreign language. I heard it coming out of one of those pumpin stations down in the Barrens. One of those pumpin stations, they look like pipes coming out of the ground—”

“I know what you mean. Was it a kid you heard?”

“At first it was a kid, then it sounded like a man.” The boy paused. “I was some scared. I ran home and told my father. He said maybe it was an echo or something, coming all the way down the pipes from someone's house.”

“Do you believe that?”

The boy smiled charmingly. “I read in my
Ripley's Believe It or Not
book that there was this guy, he got music from his teeth. Radio music. His fillings were, like, little radios. I guess if I believed that, I could believe anything.”

“A-Ayuh,” Bill said. “But did you
believe
it?”

The boy reluctantly shook his head.

“Did you ever hear those voices again?”

“Once when I was taking a bath,” the boy said. “It was a girl's voice. Just crying. No words. I was ascared to pull the plug when I was done because I thought I might, you know, drownd her.”

Bill nodded again.

The kid was looking at Bill openly now, his eyes shining and fascinated. “You know about those voices, mister?”

“I heard them,” Bill said. “A long, long time ago. Did you know any of the k-kids that have been murdered here, son?”

The shine went out of the kid's eyes; it was replaced by caution and disquiet. “My dad says I'm not supposed to talk to strangers. He says anybody could be that killer.” He took an additional step away from Bill, moving into the dappled shade of an elm tree that Bill had once driven his bike into twenty-seven years ago. He had taken a spill and bent his handlebars.

“Not me, kid,” he said. “I've been in England for the last four months. I just got into Derry yesterday.”

“I still don't have to talk to you,” the kid replied.

“That's right,” Bill agreed. “It's a f-f-free country.”

He paused and then said, “I used to pal around with Johnny Feury some of the time. He was a good kid. I cried,” the boy finished matter-of-factly, and slurped down the rest of his Freeze-Pop. As an afterthought he ran out his tongue, which was temporarily bright orange, and lapped off his arm.

“Keep away from the sewers and drains,” Bill said quietly. “Keep away from empty places and deserted places. Stay out of trainyards. But most of all, stay away from the sewers and the drains.”

The shine was back in the kid's eyes, and he said nothing for a very long time. Then: “Mister? You want to hear something funny?”

“Sure.”

“You know that movie where the shark ate all the people up?”

“Everyone does.
J-J-Jaws.”

“Well, I got this friend, you know? His name's Tommy Vicananza, and he's not that bright. Toys in the attic, you get what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“He thinks he saw that shark in the Canal. He was up there by himself in Bassey Park a couple of weeks ago, and he said he seen this
fin. He says it was eight or nine feet tall. Just the
fin
was that tall, you get me? He goes, ‘That's what killed Johnny and the other kids. It was Jaws, I know because I saw it.' So I go, ‘That Canal's so polluted nothing could live in it, not even a minnow. And you think you saw Jaws in there. You got toys in the attic, Tommy.' Tommy says it reared right out of the water like it did at the end of that movie and tried to bite him and he just got back in time. Pretty funny, huh, mister?”

“Pretty funny,” Bill agreed.

“Toys in the attic, right?”

Bill hesitated. “Stay away from the Canal too, son. You follow?”

“You mean you
believe
it?”

Bill hesitated. He meant to shrug. Instead he nodded.

The kid let out his breath in a low, hissing rush. He hung his head as if ashamed. “Yeah. Sometimes I think
I
must have toys in the attic.”

“I know what you mean.” Bill walked over to the kid, who glanced up at him solemnly but didn't shy away this time. “You're killing your knees on that board, son.”

The kid glanced down at his scabby knees and grinned. “Yeah, I guess so. I bail out sometimes.”

“Can I try it?” Bill asked suddenly.

The kid looked at him gape-mouthed at first, then laughing. “That'd be funny,” he said. “I never saw a grownup on a skateboard.”

“I'll give you a quarter,” Bill said.

“My dad said—”

“Never take money or c-candy from strangers. Good advice. I'll still give you a q-quarter. What do you say? Just to the corner of Juh-Jackson Street.”

“Never mind the quarter,” the kid said. He burst into laughter again—a gay and uncomplicated sound. A fresh sound. “I don't need your quarter. I got two bucks. I'm practically rich. I got to see this, though. Just don't blame me if you break something.”

“Don't worry,” Bill said. “I'm insured.”

He turned one of the skateboard's scuffed wheels with his finger, liking the speedy ease with which it turned—it sounded like there was about a million ball-bearings in there. It was a good sound. It
called up something very old in Bill's chest. Some desire as warm as want, as lovely as love. He smiled.

“What do you think?” the kid asked.

“I think I'm g-gonna kill myself,” Bill said, and the kid laughed.

Bill put the skateboard on the sidewalk and put one foot on it. He rolled it back and forth experimentally. The kid watched. In his mind Bill saw himself rolling down Witcham Street toward Jackson on the kid's avocado-green skateboard, the tails of his sportcoat ballooning out behind him, his bald head gleaming in the sun, his knees bent in that fragile way snowbunnies bend their knees their first day on the slopes. It was a posture that told you that in their heads they were already falling down. He bet the kid didn't ride the board like that. He bet the kid rode

(to beat the devil)

like there was no tomorrow.

That good feeling died out of his chest. He saw, all too clearly, the board going out from under his feet, shooting unencumbered down the street, an improbable fluorescent green, a color that only a child could love. He saw himself coming down on his ass, maybe on his back. Slow dissolve to a private room at the Derry Home Hospital, like the one they had visited Eddie in after his arm had been broken. Bill Denbrough in a full body-cast, one leg held up by pullies and wires. A doctor comes in, looks at his chart, looks at him, and then says: “You were guilty of two major lapses, Mr. Denbrough. The first was mismanagement of a skateboard. The second was forgetting that you are now approaching forty years of age.”

He bent, picked the skateboard back up, and handed it back to the kid. “I guess not,” he said.

“Chicken,” the kid said, not unkindly.

Bill hooked his thumbs into his armpits and flapped his elbows. “Buck-buck-buck,” he said.

The kid laughed. “Listen, I got to get home.”

“Be careful on that,” Bill said.

“You can't be careful on a skateboard,” the kid replied, looking at Bill as if he might be the one with toys in the attic.

“Right,” Bill said. “Okay. As we say in the movie biz, I hear you. But stay away from drains and sewers. And stay with your friends.”

The kid nodded. “I'm right near home.”

So was my brother,
Bill thought.

“It'll be over soon, anyway,” Bill told the kid.

“Will it?” the kid asked.

“I think so,” Bill said.

“Okay. See you later . . . chicken!”

The kid put one foot on the board and pushed off with the other. Once he was rolling he put the other foot on the board as well and went thundering down the street at what seemed to Bill a suicidal pace. But he rode as Bill had suspected he would: with lazy hipshot grace. Bill felt love for the boy, and exhilaration, and a desire to
be
the boy, along with an almost suffocating fear. The boy rode as if there were no such things as death or getting older. The boy seemed somehow eternal and ineluctable in his khaki Boy Scout shorts and scuffed sneakers, his ankles sockless and quite dirty, his hair flying back behind him.

Watch out, kid, you're not going to make the corner!
Bill thought, alarmed, but the kid shot his hips to the left like a break-dancer, his toes revolved on the green Fiberglas board, and he zoomed effortlessly around the corner and onto Jackson Street, simply assuming no one would be there to get in his way.
Kid,
Bill thought,
it won't always be that way.

He walked up to his old house but did not stop; he only slowed his walk down to an idler's pace. There were people on the lawn—a mother in a lawn chair, a sleeping baby in her arms, watching two kids, maybe ten and eight, play badminton in grass that was still wet from the rain earlier. The younger of the two, a boy, managed to hit the bird back over the net and the woman called, “Good one, Sean!”

The house was the same dark-green color and the fanlight was still over the door, but his mother's flower-beds were gone. So, from what he could see, was the jungle-gym his father had built from scavenged pipes in the back yard. He remembered the day Georgie had fallen off the top and chipped a tooth. How he had screamed!

He saw these things (the ones there and the ones gone), and thought of walking over to the woman with the sleeping baby in her arms. He thought of saying
Hello, my name is Bill Denbrough. I used to live here.
And the woman saying,
That's nice.
What else could there be? Could he ask her if the face he had carved carefully in one of the
attic beams—the face he and Georgie sometimes used to throw darts at—was still there? Could he ask her if her kids sometimes slept on the screened-in back porch when the summer nights were especially hot, talking together in low tones as they watched heat-lightning dance on the horizon? He supposed he might be able to ask some of those things, but he felt he would stutter quite badly if he tried to be charming . . . and did he really want to know the answers to any of those questions? After Georgie died it had become a cold house, and whatever he had come back to Derry for was not here.

So he went on to the corner and turned right, not looking back.

Soon he was on Kansas Street, headed back downtown. He paused for awhile at the fence which bordered the sidewalk, looking down into the Barrens. The fence was the same, rickety wood covered with fading whitewash, and the Barrens looked the same . . . wilder, if anything. The only differences he could see were that the dirty smudge of smoke which had always marked the town dump was gone (the dump had been replaced with a modern waste-treatment plant), and a long overpass marched across the tangled greenery now—the turnpike extension. Everything else was so similar that he might last have seen it the previous summer: weeds and bushes sloping down to that flat marshy area on the left and to dense copses of junky-scrubby trees on the right. He could see the stands of what they had called bamboo, the silvery-white stalks twelve and fourteen feet high. He remembered that Richie had once tried to smoke some of it, claiming it was like the stuff jazz musicians smoked and could get you high. All Richie had gotten was sick.