It (113 page)

“I've seen the clown,” he said.

“What?” Richie and Stan asked together, and Beverly turned her head so quickly that her pony-tail flipped from her left shoulder to her right.

“I saw him on the Fourth,” Mike said slowly, speaking to Bill mostly. Bill's eyes, sharp and utterly concentrated, were on his, demanding that he go on. “Yes, on the Fourth of July . . .” He trailed off momentarily, thinking:
But I knew him. I knew him because that wasn't the first time I saw him. And it wasn't the first time I saw something . . . something wrong.

He thought of the bird then, the first time he'd really allowed himself to think of it—except in nightmares—since May. He had
thought he was going crazy. It was a relief to find out he wasn't crazy . . . but it was still a scary relief. He wet his lips.

“Go on,” Bev said impatiently. “Hurry up.”

“Well, the thing is, I was in the parade. I—”

“I saw you,” Eddie said. “You were playing the saxophone.”

“Well, it's actually a trombone,” Mike said. “I play with the Neibolt Church School Band. Anyway, I saw the clown. He was handing out balloons to kids on the three-way corner downtown. He was just like Ben and Bill said. Silver suit, orange buttons, white makeup on his face, big red smile. I don't know if it was lipstick or makeup, but it looked like blood.”

The others were nodding, excited now, but Bill only went on looking at Mike closely. “O-O-Orange tufts of h-h-hair?” he asked Mike, making them unconsciously over his own head with his fingers.

Mike nodded.

“Seeing him like that . . . it scared me. And while I was looking at him, he turned around and waved at me, like he'd read my mind, or my feelings, or whatever you call it. And that . . . like, scared me worse. I didn't know why then, but he scared me so bad for a couple of seconds I couldn't play my 'bone anymore. All the spit in my mouth dried up and I felt . . .” He glanced briefly at Beverly. He remembered it all so clearly now, how the sun had suddenly seemed intolerably dazzling on the brass of his horn and the chrome of the cars, the music too loud, the sky too blue. The clown had raised one white-gloved hand (the other was full of balloon strings) and had waved slowly back and forth, his bloody grin too red and too wide, a scream turned upside-down. He remembered how the flesh of his testicles had begun to crawl, how his bowels had suddenly felt all loose and hot, as if he might suddenly drop a casual load of shit into his pants. But he couldn't say any of that in front of Beverly. You didn't say stuff like that in front of girls, even if they were the sort of girls you could say things like “bitch” and “bastard” in front of. “. . . I felt scared,” he finished, feeling that was too weak, but not knowing how to say the rest. But they were nodding as if they understood, and he felt an indescribable relief wash through him. Somehow that clown looking at him, smiling his red smile, his white-gloved hand penduluming slowly back and forth . . . that had been worse than having Henry Bowers and the rest after him. Ever so much worse.

“Then we were past,” Mike went on. “We marched up Main Street Hill. And I saw him
again,
handing out balloons to kids. Except a lot of them didn't want to take them. Some of the little ones were crying. I couldn't figure out how he could have gotten up there so fast. I thought to myself that there must be two of them, you know, both of them dressed the same way. A team. But then he turned around and waved to me again and I knew it was him. It was the same man.”

“He's not a man,” Richie said, and Beverly shuddered. Bill put his arm around her for a moment and she looked at him gratefully.

“He waved to me . . . and then he winked. Like we had a secret. Or like . . . like maybe he knew I'd recognized him.”

Bill dropped his arm from Beverly's shoulders. “You
reh-reh-reh-recognized
him?”

“I think so,” Mike said. “I have to check something before I say it's for sure. My father's got some pictures. . . . He collects them. . . . Listen, you guys play down here a lot, don't you?”

“Sure,” Ben said. “That's why we're building a clubhouse.”

Mike nodded. “I'll check and see if I'm right. If I am, I can bring the pictures.”

“O-O-Old pic-pictures?” Bill asked.

“Yes.”

“W-W-What else?” Bill asked.

Mike opened his mouth and then closed it again. He looked around at them uncertainly and then said, “You'd think I was crazy. Crazy or lying.”

“D-Do y-y-you th-think we're cruh-cruh-crazy?”

Mike shook his head.

“You bet we're not,” Eddie said. “I got a lot wrong with me, but I'm not bughouse. I don't think.”

“No,” Mike said. “I don't think you're crazy.”

“Well, we-we won't th-think you're cruh-cruh . . . nuts, e-e-either,” Bill said.

Mike looked them all over, cleared his throat, and said: “I saw a bird. Couple, three months ago. I saw a bird.”

Stan Uris looked at Mike. “What kind of a bird?”

Speaking more reluctantly than ever Mike said: “It looked like a sparrow, sort of, but it also looked like a robin. It had an orange chest.”

“Well, what's so special about a bird?” Ben asked. “There are lots of birds in Derry.” But he felt uneasy, and looking at Stan, he felt sure that Stan was remembering what had happened in the Standpipe, and how he had somehow stopped it from happening by shouting out the names of birds. But he forgot all about that and everything else when Mike spoke again.

“This bird was bigger than a housetrailer,” he said.

He looked at their shocked, amazed faces. He waited for their laughter, but none came. Stan looked as if someone had clipped him with a brick. His face had gone so pale it was the color of muted November sunlight.

“I swear it's true,” Mike said. “It was a giant bird, like one of those birds in the monster-movies that are supposed to be prehistoric.”

“Yeah, like in
The Giant Claw,”
Richie said. He thought the bird in that had been sort of fake-looking, but by the time it got to New York he had still been excited enough to spill his popcorn over the balcony railing at the Aladdin. Foxy Foxworth would have kicked him out, but the movie was over by then anyway. Sometimes you got the shit kicked out of you, but as Big Bill said, sometimes you won one, too.

“But it didn't look prehistoric,” Mike said. “And it didn't look like one of those whatdoyoucallums the Greeks and Romans made up stories about—”

“Ruh-Ruh-Rocs?” Bill suggested.

“Right, I guess so. It wasn't like those, either. It was just like a combination robin and sparrow. The two most common birds you see.” He laughed a little wildly.

“W-W-Where—” Bill began.

“Tell us,” Beverly said simply, and after a moment to collect his thoughts, Mike did. And telling it, watching their faces grow concerned and scared but not disbelieving or derisive, he felt an incredible weight lift from his chest. Like Ben with his mummy or Eddie with his leper and Stan with the drowned boys, he had seen a thing that would have driven an adult insane, not just with terror but with the walloping force of an unreality too great to be explained away or, lacking any rational explanation, simply ignored. Elijah's face had been burned black by the light of God's love, or so Mike had read; but Elijah had been an old man when it happened, and maybe that
made a difference. Hadn't one of those other Bible fellows, this one little more than a kid, actually wrestled an angel to a draw?

He had seen it and he had gone on with his life; he had integrated the memory into his view of the world. He was still young enough so that view was tremendously wide. But what had happened that day had nonetheless haunted his mind's darker corners, and sometimes in his dreams he ran from that grotesque bird as it printed its shadow on him from above. Some of these dreams he remembered and some he did not, but they were there, shadows which moved by themselves.

How little of it he had forgotten and how greatly it had troubled him (as he went about his daily round: helping his father, going to school, riding his bike, doing errands for his mother, waiting for the black groups to come on
American Bandstand
after school) was perhaps measurable in only one way—the relief he felt in sharing it with the others. As he did, he realized it was the first time he had even allowed himself to think of it fully since that early morning by the Canal, when he had seen those odd grooves . . . and the blood.

Mike told the story of the bird at the old Ironworks and how he had run into the pipe to escape it. Later on that afternoon, three of the Losers—Ben, Richie, Bill—walked toward the Derry Public Library. Ben and Richie were keeping a close watch for Bowers and Company, but Bill only looked at the sidewalk, frowning, lost in thought. About an hour after telling them his story Mike had left them, saying his father wanted him home by four to pick peas. Beverly had to do some marketing and fix dinner for her father, she said. Both Eddie and Stan had their own things to do. But before they broke up for the day they began digging what was to become—if Ben was right—their underground clubhouse. To Bill (and to all of them, he suspected), the groundbreaking had seemed an almost symbolic act. They had begun. Whatever it was they were supposed to do as a group, as a
unit,
they had begun.

Ben asked Bill if he believed Mike Hanlon's story. They were passing Derry Community House and the library was just ahead, a
stone oblong comfortably shaded by elms a century old and as yet untouched by the Dutch Elm disease that would later plague and thin them.

“Yeah,” Bill said. “I th-think it was the truh-hooth. C-C-Crazy, but true. What about you, Ruh-Ruh-Richie?”

Richie nodded. “Yeah. I hate to believe it, if you know what I mean, but I guess I do. You remember what he said about the bird's tongue?”

Bill and Ben nodded. Orange fluffs on it.

“That's the kicker,” Richie said. “It's like some comic-book villain. Lex Luthor or the Joker or someone like that. It always leaves a trademark.”

Bill nodded thoughtfully. It
was
like some comic-book villain. Because they saw it that way? Thought of it that way? Yes, perhaps so. It was kid's stuff, but it seemed that was what this thing thrived on—kid's stuff.

They crossed the street to the library side.

“I a-a-asked Stuh-Stuh-Stan i-if he e-ever h-h-heard of a buh-bird l-like that,” Bill said. “Nuh-nuh-not n-necessarily a b-b-big wuh-wuh-one, but j-just a-a-a—”

“A real
one?” Richie suggested.

Bill nodded. “H-He suh-said there m-m-might be a buh-bird like that in Suh-houth America or A-A-A-Africa, but nuh-nuh-not a-around h-h-here.”

“He didn't believe it, then?” Ben asked.

“H-H-He buh-believed i-i-it,” Bill said. And then he told them something else Stan had suggested when Bill walked with him back to where Stan had left his bike. Stan's idea was that nobody else could have seen that bird before Mike told them that story. Something else, maybe, but not that bird, because the bird was Mike Hanlon's personal monster. But now . . . why, now that bird was the property of the whole Losers' Club, wasn't it?
Any
of them might see it. It might not look exactly the same; Bill might see it as a crow, Richie as a hawk, Beverly as a golden eagle, for all Stan knew—but It could be a bird to all of them now. Bill told Stan that if that was true, then any of them might see the leper, the mummy, or possibly the dead boys.

“Which means we ought to do something pretty soon if we're going to do anything at all,” Stan had replied. “It knows . . .”

“Wuh-What?” Bill had asked sharply. “Eh-Everything we nuh-know?”

“Man, if It knows that, we're sunk,” Stan had answered. “But you can bet It knows
we
know about
It.
I think It'll try to get us. Are you still thinking about what we talked about yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“I wish I could go with you.”

“Buh-Buh-Ben and Rih-Richie w-w-will. Ben's really s-s-smart, and Rih-Rih-Richie is, too, when he ih-isn't fucking o-off.”

Now, standing outside the library, Richie asked Bill exactly what it was he had in mind. Bill told them, speaking slowly so he wouldn't stutter too badly. The idea had been circling in his mind for the last two weeks, but it had taken Mike's story of the bird to crystallize it.

What did you do if you wanted to get rid of a bird?

Well, shooting it was pretty goddam final.

What did you do if you wanted to get rid of a monster?

Well, the movies suggested that shooting it with a silver bullet was pretty goddam final.

Ben and Richie listened to this respectfully enough. Then Richie asked, “How do you get a silver bullet, Big Bill? Send away for it?”

“Very fuh-fuh-funny. We'll have to m-m-make it.”

“How?”

“I guess that's what we're at the library to find out,” Ben said.

Richie nodded and pushed his glasses up on his nose. Behind them, his eyes were sharp and thoughtful . . . but doubtful, Bill thought. He felt doubtful himself. At least there was no foolishness in Richie's eyes, and that was a step in the right direction.

“You thinking about your dad's Walther?” Richie asked. “The one we took to Neibolt Street?”

“Yes,” Bill said.

“Even if we could really make silver bullets,” Richie said, “where would we get the silver?”

“Let me worry about that,” Ben said quietly.

“Well . . . okay,” Richie said. “We'll let Haystack worry about that. Then what? Neibolt Street again?”

Bill nodded. “Nee-Nee-Neibolt Street a-a-again. And then we buh-blow its fucking h-h-head o-off.”