It (129 page)

“You'd jerk away and he'd grin and then maybe he'd open his pencil box so you could see the dead flies inside,” Beverly says. “And the worst thing—the horrible thing—was the way he'd smile and never say anything. Mrs. Douglas knew. Greta Bowie told on him, and I think Sally Mueller said something once, too. But . . . I think Mrs. Douglas was scared of him, too.”

Ben has rocked back on the rear legs of his chair, and his hands are laced behind his neck. She still cannot believe how lean he is. “I'm pretty sure you're right,” he says.

“Wh-What h-happened to h-h-him, Beverly?” Bill asks.

She swallows again, trying to fight off the nightmarish power of what she saw that day in the Barrens, her roller skates tied together and hung over her shoulder, one knee a stinging net of pain from a fall she had taken on Saint Crispin's Lane, another of the short tree-lined streets that dead-ended where the land fell (and still falls) sharply into the Barrens. She remembers (oh these memories, when they come, are so clear and so powerful) that she was wearing a pair of denim shorts—really
too
short, they came only to just below the hem of her panties. She had become more conscious of her body over
the last year—over the last six months, actually, as it began to curve and become more womanly. The mirror was one reason for this heightened consciousness, of course, but not the main one; the main one was that her father seemed even sharper just lately, more apt to use his slapping hand or even his fists. He seemed restless, almost caged, and she was more and more nervous when she was around him, more and more on her mark. It was as if there was a smell they made between them, a smell that wasn't there when she was in the apartment alone, one that had never been there when they were in it together—not until this summer. And when Mom was gone it was worse. If there was a smell, some smell, then he knew it too, maybe, because Bev saw less and less of him as the hot weather wore on, partly because of his summer bowling league, partly because he was helping his friend Joe Tammerly fix cars . . . but she suspects it was partly that smell, the one they made between them, neither of them meaning to but making it just the same, as helpless to stop it as either was helpless to stop sweating in July.

The vision of the birds, hundreds and thousands of them, descending on the roofpeaks of houses, on telephone wires, on TV aerials, intervenes again.

“And poison ivy,” she says aloud.

“W-W-What?” Bill asks.

“Something about poison ivy,” she says slowly, looking at him. “But it wasn't. It just
felt
like poison ivy. Mike—?”

“Never mind,” Mike says. “It will come. Tell us what you do remember, Bev.”

I remember the blue shorts,
she would tell them,
and how faded they were getting; how tight around my hips and butt. I had half a pack of Lucky Strikes in one pocket and the Bullseye in the other—

“Do you remember the Bullseye?” she asks Richie, but they all nod.

“Bill gave it to me,” she says. “I didn't want it, but it . . . he . . .” She smiles at Bill, a little wanly. “You couldn't say no to Big Bill, that was all. So I had it and that's why I was out by myself that day. To practice. I still didn't think I'd have the guts to use it when the time came. Except . . . I used it that day. I had to. I killed one of them . . . one of the parts of It. It was terrible. Even now it's hard for me to think of. And one of the others got me. Look.”

She raises her arm and turns it over so they can all see a puckery scar on the roundest part of her upper forearm. It looks as if a hot circular object about the size of a Havana cigar had been pressed against her skin. It is slightly
sunken, and looking at it gives Mike Hanlon a chill. This is one of the parts of the story which, like Eddie's unwilling heart-to-heart with Keene, he has suspected but never actually heard.

“You were right about one thing, Richie,” she says. “That Bullseye was a killer. I was scared of it, but I sorta loved it, too.”

Richie laughs and claps her on the back. “Shit, I knew that back then, you stupid skirt.”

“You did? Really?”

“Yeah, really,” he says. “It was something in your eyes, Bevvie.”

“I mean, it looked like a toy, but it was
real.
You could blow holes in things.”

“And you blew a hole in something with it that day,” Ben muses.

She nods.

“Was it Patrick you—”

“No, God no!” Beverly says. “It was the other . . . wait.” She crushes out her cigarette, sips her drink, and gets herself under control again. Finally she is. Well . . . no. But she has a feeling it's the closest she's going to get tonight. “I was roller-skating, you see, and I fell down and gave myself a good scrape. Then I decided I'd go down to the Barrens and practice. I went by the clubhouse first to see if you guys were there. You weren't. Just that smoky smell. You guys remember how long that place went on smelling of smoke?”

They all nod, smiling.

“We never really did get the smell out, did we?” Ben says.

“So then I headed down to the dump,” she says, “because that's where we had the . . . the tryouts, I guess you'd call them, and I knew there'd be lots of things to shoot at. Maybe even, you know, rats.” She pauses. There's a fine misty sweat on her forehead now. “That's what I really wanted to shoot at,” she says finally. “Something that was alive. Not a seagull—I knew I couldn't shoot a gull—but a rat . . . I wanted to see if I could.

“I'm glad I came from the Kansas Street side instead of the Old Cape side, though, because there wasn't much cover over there by the railroad embankment. They would have seen me and God knows what would have happened then.”

“Who would have suh-suh-seen y-you?”

“Them,”
Beverly says. “Henry Bowers, Victor Criss, Belch Huggins, and Patrick Hockstetter. They were down in the dump and—”

Suddenly, amazing all of them, she begins to giggle like a child, her cheeks turning rose-red. She giggles until tears stand in her eyes.

“What the hell, Bev,” Richie says. “Let us in on the joke.”

“Oh it was a joke, all right,” she says. “It was a joke, but I think they might have killed me if they knew I'd seen.”

“I remember now!” Ben cries, and he begins to laugh, too. “I remember you telling us!”

Giggling wildly, Beverly says, “They had their pants down and they were lighting farts.”

There is an instant of thunderstruck silence and then they all begin to laugh—the sound echoes through the library.

Thinking of exactly how to tell them of Patrick Hockstetter's death, the thing she fixes on first is how approaching the town dump from the Kansas Street side was like entering some weird asteroid belt. There was a rutted dirt track (a town road, actually; it even had a name, Old Lyme Street) that ran from Kansas Street to the dump, the only actual road into the Barrens—the city's dump trucks used it. Beverly walked near Old Lyme Street but didn't take it—she had grown more cautious—she supposed all of them had—since Eddie's arm had been broken. Especially when she was alone.

She wove her way through the heavy undergrowth, skirting a patch of poison ivy with its reddish oily leaves, smelling the dump's smoky rot, hearing the seagulls. On her left, through occasional breaks in the foliage, she could see Old Lyme Street.

The others are looking at her, waiting. She checks her cigarette pack and finds it empty. Wordlessly, Richie tosses her one of his.

She lights up, looks around at them, and says: “Heading toward the dump from the Kansas Street side was a little like

entering some weird asteroid belt. The dumpoid belt. At first there was nothing but the underbrush growing from the spongy ground underfoot, and then you would see your first dumpoid: a rusty can that had once contained Prince Spaghetti Sauce, maybe, or an S'OK soda bottle crawling with bugs attracted by the sweet-sticky remains of cream soda or birch beer. Then there would be a bright wink of sun kicking off a scrap of tinfoil caught in a tree. You might see a bedspring (or trip over it, if you weren't watching where you were going) or a bone some dog had carried away, gnawed, dropped.

The dump itself wasn't so bad—was, in fact, sort of interesting, Beverly thought. What was nasty (and sort of creepy) was the way it had of spreading. Of creating this dumpoid belt.

She was getting closer now; the trees were bigger, mostly firs, and the bushes were thinning out. The gulls cheeped and cried in their shrill querulous voices, and the air was smudgy with the smell of burning.

Now, on Beverly's right, leaning at an angle against the base of a spruce tree, was a rusty Amana refrigerator. Beverly glanced at it, thinking vaguely of the state policeman who had visited her class when she had been in the third grade. He had told them that such things as discarded refrigerators were dangerous—a kid could climb into one while playing hide-and-go-seek, for instance, and smother to death inside. Although why anyone would want to get in a scroungy old—

She heard a shout, so close it made her jump, followed by laughter. Beverly grinned. So they
were
here. They had left the clubhouse because of the smoky smell and had come down here. They were maybe breaking bottles with rocks, maybe just dump-picking.

She began to walk a little faster, the nasty scrape she had gotten earlier now forgotten in her eagerness to see them . . . to see
him,
with his red hair so much like hers, to see if he would smile at her in that oddly endearing one-sided way of his. She knew she was too young to love a boy, too young to have anything but “crushes,” but she loved Bill just the same. And she walked a little faster, her skates swinging heavily from her shoulder, the sling of his Bullseye beating soft time against her left buttock.

She almost walked into them before realizing it wasn't her gang at all, but Bowers's.

She walked out of the screening bushes and the dump's steepest side lay about seventy yards ahead, a twinkling avalanche of junk lying along the high angle of the gravel-pit. Mandy Fazio's bulldozer was off to the left. Much closer in front of her was a wilderness of junked cars. At the end of each month these were crushed and hauled off to Portland for scrap, but now there were a dozen or more, some sitting on bare wheel-rims, some on their sides, one or two lying on their roofs like dead dogs. They were arranged in two rows and Beverly walked down the rough trash-littered aisle between them like
some punk bride of the future, wondering idly if she could break a windshield with the Bullseye. One of the pockets of her blue shorts bulged with the small ball-bearings that were her practice ammo.

The voices and laughter were coming from beyond the junked-out cars and to the left, at the edge of the dump proper. Beverly rounded the last one, a Studebaker with its entire front end missing. Her hail of greeting died on her lips. The hand she had put up to wave did not exactly fall back to her side; it seemed to wilt.

Her first furiously embarrassed thought was:
Oh dear God, why are they all naked?

This was followed by the scary realization of who they were. She froze there in front of the half-Studebaker with her shadow stapled to the heels of her low-topped sneakers. For that one moment she was totally visible to them; if any of the four had looked up from the circle they were squatting in, he could not have missed her, a girl of slightly more than medium height, a pair of skates over one shoulder, the knee of one long coltish leg still oozing blood, her mouth slack-jawed, her cheeks scarlet.

Before darting back behind the Studebaker she saw that they weren't entirely naked after all; they had their shirts on, and their pants and underpants were simply pulled down to their shoetops, as if they had to Go Number Two (in her shock, Beverly's mind had automatically reverted to the euphemism she had been taught as a toddler)—except whoever heard of four boys Going Number Two at the same time?

Once out of sight again, her first thought was to get away—get away fast. Her heart was pumping hard, her muscles heavy with adrenaline. She looked around, seeing what she hadn't bothered to notice walking up here, when she had thought the voices she heard belonged to her friends. The row of junked cars on her left was really pretty thin—they were by no means packed in door to door as they would be in the week or so before the crusher came to turn them into rough blocks of twinkling metal. She had been exposed to the boys several times walking up to where she was now; if she retreated, she would be exposed again, and this time she might be seen.

Also, she felt a certain shameful curiosity: what in the
world
could they be doing?

Carefully, she peeked around the Studebaker.

Henry and Victor Criss were more or less facing in her direction. Patrick Hockstetter was on Henry's left. Belch Huggins had his back to her. She observed the fact that Belch had an extremely
large,
extremely
hairy
ass, and half-hysterical giggles suddenly bubbled up her throat like the head on a glass of ginger ale. She had to clap both hands over her mouth and withdraw behind the Studebaker again, struggling to hold the giggles in.

You've got to get out of here, Beverly. If they catch you—

She looked back down between the junked cars, still holding her hands over her mouth. The aisle was maybe ten feet wide, littered with cans, twinkling with little jigsaw pieces of Saf-T-Glas, scruffy with weeds. If she so much as made a sound, they might hear her . . . particularly if their absorption in whatever strange thing they were doing flagged. When she thought of how casually she had walked up here, her blood ran cold. Also . . .