It (124 page)

He started slowly toward Up-Mile Hill, dreading the stiff climb in this heat. It felt almost hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. For the first time he found himself wishing for school to be in again, for a new grade and a new teacher's peculiarities to contend with. For this dreadful summer to be over.

He stopped halfway up the hill, not far from where Bill Denbrough would rediscover his bike Silver twenty-seven years later, and pulled his aspirator from his pocket.
Hydrox Mist,
the label said.
Administer as needed.

Something else clicked home.
Administer as needed.
He was only a kid, still wet behind the ears (as his mother sometimes told him when she was “slapping down the cards”), but even a kid of eleven knew that you didn't give someone real medicine and then write on the label
Administer as needed.
If it was real medicine, it would be too easy to kill yourself as you went happy-assholing around and administering as needed. He supposed you could kill yourself with plain old aspirin doing that.

He looked fixedly at the aspirator, unaware of the old lady who glanced curiously at him as she passed on down the hill toward Main
Street with her shopping basket over her arm. He felt betrayed. And for one moment he almost cast the plastic squeeze-bottle into the gutter—better yet, he thought, throw it down that sewer-grating. Sure! Why not? Let It have it down there in Its tunnels and dripping sewer-pipes. Have a pla-cee-bo, you hundred-faced creep! He uttered a wild laugh and came within an ace of doing it. But in the end, habit was simply too strong. He replaced the aspirator in his right front pants pocket and walked on, hardly hearing the occasional blare of a horn or the diesel drone of the Bassey Park bus as it passed him. He was likewise unaware of how close he was to discovering what being hurt—really hurt—was all about.

When he came out of the Costello Avenue Market twenty-five minutes later with a Pepsi in one hand and two Payday candybars in the other, Eddie was unpleasantly surprised to see Henry Bowers, Victor Criss, Moose Sadler, and Patrick Hockstetter kneeling on the crushed gravel to the left of the little store. For a moment Eddie thought they were shooting craps; then he saw they were pooling their money on Victor's baseball shirt. Their summer-school textbooks lay off to one side in an untidy heap.

On an ordinary day Eddie might have simply faded quietly back into the store and asked Mr. Gedreau if he could leave by the back door but this had been no ordinary day. Eddie froze right where he was instead, one hand still holding the screen door with its tin cigarette signs (
WINSTON TASTES GOOD, LIKE A CIGARETTE SHOULD, TWENTY-ONE GREAT TOBACCOS MAKE TWENTY WONDERFUL SMOKES
, the bellboy who was shouting
CALL FOR PHILIP MORRIS
), the other clutching the brown grocery bag and the white drugstore bag.

Victor Criss saw him and elbowed Henry. Henry looked up; so did Patrick Hockstetter. Moose, whose relays worked more slowly, went on counting out pennies for five seconds or so before the sudden silence sank into him and he also looked up.

Henry stood, brushing loose pieces of gravel from the knees of the biballs he was wearing. There were splints on the sides of his bandaged nose, and his voice had a nasal foghorning quality. “Well I be
go to hell,” he said. “One of the rock-throwers. Where's your friends,' asshole? They inside?”

Eddie was shaking his head numbly before he realized this was another mistake.

Henry's smile broadened. “Well, that's okay,” he said. “I don't mind taking you one by one. Come on down here, asshole.”

Victor stood beside Henry; Patrick Hockstetter trailed behind them, smiling in a porky vacant way Eddie was familiar with from school. Moose was still getting up.

“Come on, asshole,” Henry said. “Let's talk about throwing rocks. Let's talk about that, you wanna?”

Now that it was too late Eddie decided it would be wise to go back into the store. Back in the store where there was a grownup. But as he retreated Henry darted forward and grabbed him. He pulled Eddie's arm, pulled hard, his smile turning into a snarl. Eddie's hand was ripped free of the screen door. He was pulled off the steps and would have crashed headlong into the gravel if Victor hadn't caught him roughly under the arms. Victor threw him. Eddie managed to keep on his feet, but only by whirling around twice. The four boys faced him now over a distance of about ten feet, Henry slightly ahead of the others, smiling. His hair stood up at the back in a cowlick.

Behind Henry and on his left was Patrick Hockstetter, a genuinely spooky kid. Eddie hadn't ever seen him with anyone else until today. He was just enough overweight so that his belly always hung slightly over his belt, which had a Red Ryder buckle. His face was perfectly round, and usually as pale as cream. Now he had a slight sunburn. It was heaviest on his nose, which was peeling, but it spread out toward either cheek like wings. In school, Patrick liked to kill flies with his green plastic SkoolTime ruler and put them in his pencil-box. Sometimes he would show his fly collection to some new kid in the playyard at recess, his heavy lips smiling, his gray-green eyes sober and thoughtful. He never spoke when he exhibited his dead flies, no matter what the new kid might say to him. That expression was on his face now.

“How ya doin, Rock Man?” Henry asked, advancing across the distance between them. “Got any rocks on you?”

“Leave me alone,” Eddie said in a trembling voice.

“ ‘Leave me alone,' ” Henry mimicked, waving his hands in mock
terror. Victor laughed. “What are you going to do if I don't, Rock Man? Huh?” His hand flashed out, incredibly fast, and exploded against Eddie's cheek with a gunshot sound. Eddie's head rocked back. Tears began to pour from his left eye.

“My friends are inside,” Eddie said.

“ ‘My friends are inside,' ” Patrick Hockstetter squealed. “Ooooh! Ooooh!
Ooooh!”
He began to circle to Eddie's right.

Eddie started to turn in that direction, Henry's hand flashed out again, and this time his other cheek flamed.

Don't cry,
he thought,
that's what they want, but don't you do it Eddie Bill wouldn't do it, Bill wouldn't cry, and don't you cry, eith—

Victor stepped forward and gave Eddie a hard open-handed push in the middle of his chest. Eddie stumbled half a step backward and then fell sprawling over Patrick, who had crouched directly behind his feet. He thudded to the gravel, scraping his arms. There was a
whoof!
as the wind rushed out of him.

A moment later Henry Bowers was on top of him, his knees pinning Eddie's arms, his butt on Eddie's stomach.

“Got any rocks, Rock Man?” Henry raved down at him, and Eddie was more frightened by the mad light in Henry's eyes than he was by the pain in his arms or by his inability to get his breath back. Henry was nuts. Somewhere close by, Patrick tittered.

“You wanna throw rocks? Huh? I'll give you rocks! Here! Here's some rocks!”

Henry swept up a handful of gravel and slammed it down into Eddie's face. He rubbed the gravel into Eddie's skin, cutting his cheeks, his eyelids, his lips. Eddie opened his mouth and screamed.

“Want rocks? I'll give you rocks! Here's some rocks, Rock Man! You want rocks? Okay! Okay! Okay!”

Gravel slammed into his open mouth, lacerating his gums, grinding against his teeth. He felt sparks fly against his fillings. He screamed again and spat gravel out.

“Want some more rocks? Okay? How about a few more? How about—”

“Stop that! Here, here! Stop that! You, boy! Quit on him! Right now! You hear me? Quit on him!”

Through half-lidded, tear-blurred eyes, Eddie saw a big hand come down and grab Henry by the collar of his shirt and the right
strap of his biballs. The hand gave a yank and Henry was pulled off. He landed in the gravel and got up. Eddie rose more slowly. He was trying to scramble to his feet, but his scrambler seemed temporarily broken. He gasped and spat chunks of bloody gravel out of his mouth.

It was Mr. Gedreau, dressed in his long white apron, and he looked furious. There was no fear in his face, although Henry stood about three inches taller and probably outweighed him by fifty pounds. There was no fear in his face because he was the grownup and Henry was the kid. Except this time, Eddie thought, that might not mean anything. Mr. Gedreau didn't understand. He didn't understand that Henry was nuts.

“You get out of here,” Mr. Gedreau said, advancing on Henry until he stood toe to toe with the hulking sullen-faced boy. “You get out and you don't want to come back, either. I don't hold with bullying. I don't hold with four against one. What would your mothers think?”

He swept the others with his hot, angry eyes. Moose and Victor dropped their gazes and examined their sneakers. Patrick only stared at and through Mr. Gedreau with that vacant gray-green look. Mr. Gedreau looked back at Henry and got just as far as “You get on your bikes and—” when Henry gave him a good hard push.

An expression of surprise that would have been comical in other circumstances spread across Mr. Gedreau's face as he flew backward, loose gravel spurting out from under his heels. He struck the steps leading up to the screen door and sat down hard.

“Why you—” he began.

Henry's shadow fell on him. “Get inside,” he said.

“You—” Mr. Gedreau said, and this time he stopped on his own. Mr. Gedreau had finally seen it, Eddie realized—the light in Henry's eyes. He got up quickly, apron flapping. He went up the stairs as fast as he could, stumbling on the second one from the top and going briefly to one knee. He was up again at once, but that stumble, as brief as it had been, seemed to rob him of the rest of his grownup authority.

He spun around at the top and yelled: “I'm calling the cops!”

Henry made as if to lunge for him, and Mr. Gedreau flinched back. That was the end, Eddie realized. As incredible, as unthinkable as it seemed, there was no protection for him here. It was time to go.

While Henry was standing at the bottom of the steps and glaring up at Mr. Gedreau and while the others were staring, transfixed (and, except for Patrick Hockstetter, not a little horrified) by this sudden successful defiance of adult authority, Eddie saw his chance. He whirled, took to his heels, and ran.

He was halfway up the block before Henry turned, his eyes blazing.
“Get him!”
he bellowed.

Asthma or no asthma, Eddie ran them a good race that day. There were spaces, some of them as long as fifty feet, when he couldn't remember if the soles of his P.F. Flyers had touched the sidewalk or not. For a few moments he even entertained the giddy notion that he might be able to outrun them.

Then, just before he reached Kansas Street and what might have been safety, a little kid on a trike suddenly pedaled out of a driveway and right into Eddie's path. Eddie tried to swerve, but running full-out as he had been, he might have done better to jump over the kid (the kid's name, in fact, was Richard Cowan, and he would grow up, marry, and father a son named Frederick Cowan, who would be drowned in a toilet and then be partially eaten by a thing that rose up from the toilet like black smoke and then took an unthinkable shape), or at least to try.

One of Eddie's feet caught on the trike's back deck, where an adventurous little shit might stand and push the trike along like a scooter. Richard Cowan, whose unborn son would be murdered by It twenty-seven years later, barely rocked on his trike. Eddie, however, went flying. He struck the sidewalk on his shoulder, rebounded, came down again, and skidded ten feet, erasing the skin from his. elbows and knees. He was trying to get up when Henry Bowers hit him like a shell from a bazooka and knocked him flat. Eddie's nose connected briskly with the concrete. Blood flew.

Henry did a quick side-roll like a paratrooper and was up again. He grabbed Eddie by the nape of the neck and by his right wrist. His breath, snorting through his swelled and splinted nose, was warm and moist.

“Want rocks, Rock Man? Sure! Shit!” He jerked Eddie's wrist halfway up his back. Eddie yelled. “Rocks for the Rock Man, right, Rock Man?” He jerked Eddie's wrist up even higher. Eddie screamed. Behind him, dimly, he could hear the others approaching, and the little
kid on the trike starting to bawl.
Join the club, kid,
he thought, and in spite of the pain, in spite of the tears and the fear, he brayed a huge donkeylike hee-haw of laughter.

“You think this is
funny?”
Henry asked, sounding suddenly astounded rather than furious. “You think this is
funny?”
And did Henry also sound
scared?
Years later Eddie would think
Yes, scared, he sounded scared.

Eddie twisted his wrist in Henry's grip. He was slick with sweat and he almost got away. Perhaps that was why Henry shoved Eddie's wrist up harder this time than before. Eddie heard a crack in his arm like the sound of winterwood giving under an accumulated plate of ice. The pain that rolled out of his fractured arm was gray and huge. He shrieked, but the sound seemed distant. The color was washing out of the world, and when Henry let go of him and pushed, he seemed to float toward the sidewalk. It took a long time to get down to that old sidewalk. He had a good look at every single crack in it as he glided down. He had a chance to admire the way the July sun glinted off the flecks of mica in that old sidewalk. He had a chance to note the remains of a very old hopscotch grid that had been done in pink chalk on that old sidewalk. Then, for just a moment, it swam and looked like something else. It looked like a turtle.

He might have fainted then, but he struck on his newly broken arm, and this fresh pain was sharp, bright, hot, terrible. He felt the splintered ends of the greenstick fracture grind together. He bit his tongue, bringing fresh blood. He rolled over on his back and saw Henry, Victor, Moose, and Patrick standing over him. They looked impossibly tall, impossibly high up, like pallbearers peering into a grave.