It (151 page)

The front of the mailbox suddenly swung down. Henry walked toward it and peered in. Although the mailman didn't get this far out until the middle of the afternoon, Henry felt no surprise when he saw a flat rectangular package inside. He pulled it out.
MR. HENRY BOWERS, RFD
#2,
DERRY MAINE
, the address read. There was even a return-address of sorts:
MR. ROBERT GRAY, DERRY, MAINE
.

He opened the package, letting the brown paper drift down heedlessly by his feet. There was a white box inside. He opened it. Lying on a bed of white cotton had been the switchknife. He took it into the house.

His father was lying on his pallet in the bedroom they shared, surrounded by empty beer cans, his belly bulging over the top of his yellow underpants. Henry knelt beside him, listening to the snort and flutter of his father's breathing, watching his father's horsey lips purse and pucker with each breath.

Henry placed the business-end of the switchknife against his father's scrawny neck. His father moved a little and then settled back into beery sleep again. Henry kept the knife like that for almost five
minutes, his eyes distant and thoughtful, the ball of his left thumb caressing the silver button set into the switchblade's neck. The voice from the moon spoke to him—it whispered like the spring wind which is warm with a cold blade buried somewhere in its middle, it buzzed like a paper nest full of roused hornets, it huckstered like a hoarse politician.

Everything the voice said seemed pretty much okey-dokey to Henry and so he pushed the silver button. There was a
click
inside the knife as the suicide-spring let go, and six inches of steel drove through Butch Bowers's neck. It went in as easily as the tines of a meat-fork into the breast of a well-roasted chicken. The tip of the blade popped out on the other side, dripping.

Butch's eyes flew open. He stared at the ceiling. His mouth dropped open. Blood ran from the corners of it and down his cheeks toward the lobes of his ears. He began to gurgle. A large blood-bubble formed between his slack lips and popped. One of his hands crept to Henry's knee and squeezed convulsively. Henry didn't mind. Presently the hand fell away. The gurgling noises stopped a moment later. Butch Bowers was dead.

Henry pulled the knife out, wiped it on the dirty sheet that covered his father's pallet, and pushed the blade back in until the spring clicked again. He looked at his father without much interest. The voice had told him about the day's work while he knelt beside Butch with the knife against Butch's neck. The voice had explained everything. So he went into the other room to call Belch and Victor.

Now here they were, all three, and although his balls still ached horribly, the knife made a comforting bulge in his left front pants pocket. He felt that the cutting would begin soon. The others would come back down to resume whatever baby game they had been playing, and then the cutting would begin. The voice from the moon had laid it out for him as he knelt by his father, and on his way into town he had been unable to take his eyes from that pale ghost-disc in the sky. He saw that there was indeed a man in the moon—a grisly, glimmering ghost-face with cratered holes for eyes and a glabrous grin that seemed to reach halfway up its cheekbones. It talked

(we float down here Henry we all float you'll float too)

all the way to town.
Kill them all, Henry,
the ghost-voice from the moon said, and Henry could dig it; Henry felt he could second that
emotion. He would kill them all, his tormentors, and then those feelings—that he was losing his grip, that he was coming inexorably to a larger world he would not be able to dominate as he had dominated the playyard at Derry Elementary, that in the wider world the fatboy and the nigger and the stuttering freak might somehow grow larger while he somehow only grew older—would be gone.

He would kill them all, and the voices—those inside and the one which spoke to him from the moon—would leave him alone. He would kill them and then go back to the house and sit on the back porch with his father's souvenir Jap sword across his lap. He would drink one of his father's Rheingolds. He would listen to the radio, too, but no baseball. Baseball was strictly Squaresville. He would listen to rock and roll instead. Although Henry didn't know it (and wouldn't have cared if he did), on this one subject he and the Losers agreed: rock and roll was pretty much okey-dokey. We got chicken in the barn, whose barn, what barn, my barn. Everything would be good then; everything would be the ginchiest then; everything would be okeyfine then, and anything which might come next would not matter. The voice would take care of him—he sensed that. If you took care of It, It would take care of you. That was how things had always been in Derry.

But the kids had to be stopped, stopped soon, stopped today. The voice had told him so.

Henry took his new knife out of his pocket, looked at it, turned it this way and that, admiring the way the sun winked and slid off the chrome facing. Then Belch was grabbing his arm and hissing: “Looka that, Henry! Jeezly-old-crow! Looka that!”

Henry looked and felt the clear light of understanding burst over him. A square section of the clearing was rising as if by magic, revealing a growing slice of darkness beneath. For just a moment he felt a jolt of terror as it occurred to him that this might be the owner of the voice . . . for surely It lived somewhere under the city. Then he heard the gritty squall of dirt in the hinges and understood. They hadn't been able to see the treehouse because there was none.

“By God, we was standin right on top of em,” Victor grunted, and as Ben's head and shoulders appeared in the square hatchway in the center of the clearing, he made as if to charge forward. Henry grabbed him and held him back.

“Ain't we gonna get em, Henry?” Victor asked as Ben boosted himself up.

“We'll get em,” Henry said, never taking his eyes from the hated fatboy. Another ball-kicker.
I'll kick your balls so high up you can wear them for earrings, you fat fuck. Wait and see if I don't.
“Don't worry.”

The fatboy was helping the bitch out of the hole. She looked around doubtfully, and for a moment Henry believed she looked right at him. Then her eyes passed on. The two of them murmured together and then they pushed their way into the thick undergrowth and were gone.

“Come on,” Henry said, when the sound of snapping branches and rustling leaves had faded almost to inaudibility. “We'll follow em. But keep back and keep quiet. I want em all together.”

The three of them crossed the clearing like soldiers on patrol, bent low, their eyes wide and moving. Belch paused to look down into the clubhouse and shook his head in admiring wonder. “Sittin right over their heads, I was,” he said.

Henry motioned him forward impatiently.

They took the path, because it was quieter. They were halfway back to Kansas Street when the bitch and the fatboy, holding hands
(Isn't that cute?
Henry thought in a kind of ecstasy), emerged almost directly in front of them.

Luckily, their backs were to Henry's group, and neither of them looked around. Henry, Victor, and Belch froze, then drew into the shadows at the side of the path. Soon Ben and Beverly were just two shirts seen through a tangle of shrubs and bushes. The three of them began to pursue again . . . cautiously. Henry took the knife out again and

Henry Gets a Lift/2:30
A.M.

pressed the chrome button in the handle. The blade popped out. He looked at it dreamily in the moonlight. He liked the way the starlight ran along the blade. He had no idea exactly what time it was. He was drifting in and out of reality now.

A sound impinged on his consciousness and began to grow. It was
a car engine. It drew closer. Henry's eyes widened in the dark. He held the knife more tightly, waiting for the car to pass by.

It didn't. It drew up at the curb beyond the seminary hedge and simply stopped there, engine idling. Grimacing (his belly was stiffening now; it had gone board-hard, and the blood seeping sluggishly between his fingers had the consistency of sap just before you took the taps out of the maples in late March or early April), he got on his knees and pushed aside the stiff hedge-branches. He could see headlights and the shape of a car. Cops? His hand squeezed the knife and relaxed, squeezed and relaxed, squeezed and relaxed.

I
sent you a ride, Henry,
the voice whispered.
Sort of a taxi, if you can dig that. After all, we have to get you over there to the Town House pretty soon. The night's getting old.

The voice uttered one thin bonelike chuckle and fell silent. Now the only sounds were the crickets and the steady rumble of the idling car.
Sounds like cherry-bomb mufflers,
Henry thought distractedly.

He got awkwardly to his feet and worked his way back, to the seminary walk. He peeked around at the car. Not a fuzzmobile: no bubbles on the roof, and the shape was all wrong. The shape was . . .
old.

Henry heard that giggle again . . . or perhaps it was only the wind.

He emerged from the shadow of the hedge, crawled under the chain, got to his feet again, and began to walk toward the idling car, which existed in a black-and-white Polaroid-snapshot world of bright moonlight and impenetrable shadow. Henry was a mess: his shirt was black with blood, and it had soaked through his jeans almost to the knees. His face was a white blotch under an institutional crewcut.

He reached the intersection of the seminary path and the sidewalk and peered at the car, trying to make sense out of the hulk behind the wheel. But it was the car he recognized first—it was the one his father always swore he would own someday, a 1958 Plymouth Fury. It was red and white and Henry knew (hadn't his father told him often enough?) that the engine rumbling under the hood was a V-8 327. Available horsepower of 255, able to hit seventy from the git-go in just about nine seconds, gobbling hi-test through its four-barrel carb.
I'm gonna get that car and then when I die they can bury me in it,
Butch had been fond of saying . . . except, of course, he had never
gotten the car and the state had buried him after Henry had been taken away, raving and screaming of monsters, to the funny farm.

If that's him inside I don't think I can take it,
Henry thought, squeezing down on the knife, swaying drunkenly back and forth, looking at the shape behind the wheel.

Then the passenger door of the Fury swung open, the domelight came on, and the driver turned to look at him. It was Belch Huggins. His face was a hanging ruin. One of his eyes was gone, and a rotted hole in one parchment cheek revealed blackened teeth. Perched on Belch's head was the New York Yankees baseball cap he had been wearing the day he died. It was turned around backward. Gray-green mold oozed along the bill.

“Belch!” Henry cried, and agony ripped its way up from his belly, making him cry out again, wordlessly.

Belch's dead lips stretched in a grin, splitting open in whitish-gray bloodless folds. He held one twisted hand out toward the open door in invitation.

Henry hesitated, then shuffled around the Fury's grille, allowing one hand to touch the V-shaped emblem there, just as he had always touched it when his father took him into the Bangor showroom when he was a kid to look at this same car. As he reached the passenger side, grayness overwhelmed him in a soft wave and he had to grab the open door to keep his feet. He stood there, head down, breathing in snuffling gasps. At last the world came back—partway, anyhow—and he was able to work his way around the door and fall into the seat. Pain skewered his guts again, and fresh blood squirted out into his hand. It felt like warm jelly. He put his head back and gritted his teeth, the cords on his neck standing out. At last the pain began to subside a little.

The door swung shut by itself. The domelight went out. Henry saw one of Belch's rotted hands close over the transmission lever and drop it into drive. The bunched white knots of Belch's knuckles glimmered through the decaying flesh of his fingers.

The Fury began to move down Kansas Street toward Up-Mile Hill.

“How you doin, Belch?” Henry heard himself say. It was stupid, of course—Belch couldn't be here, dead people couldn't drive cars—but it was all he could think of.

Belch didn't reply. His one sunken eye stared at the road. His teeth glared sickly at Henry through the hole in his cheek. Henry became vaguely aware that ole Belch smelled pretty ripe. Ole Belch smelled, in fact, like a bushel-basket of tomatoes that had gone bad and watery.

The glove compartment flopped open, banging Henry's knees, and in the light of the small bulb inside he saw a bottle of Texas Driver, half-full. He took it out, opened it, and had himself a good shot. It went down like cool silk and hit his stomach like an explosion of lava. He shuddered all over, moaning . . . and then began to feel a little better, a little more connected to the world.

“Thanks,” he said.

Belch's head turned toward him. Henry could hear the tendons in Belch's neck; the sound was like the scream of rusty screen-door hinges. Belch regarded him for a moment with a dead one-eyed stare, and Henry realized for the first time that most of Belch's nose was gone. It looked like something had been at the ole Belcher's nose. Dog, maybe. Or maybe rats. Rats seemed more likely. The tunnels they had chased the little kids into that day had been full of rats.

Moving just as slowly, Belch's head turned toward the road again. Henry was glad. Ole Belch staring at him that way, well, Henry hadn't been able to dig it too much. There had been something in Belch's single sunken eye. Reproach? Anger? What?

There is a dead boy behind the wheel of this car.

Henry looked down at his arm and saw that huge goose-bumps had formed there. He quickly had another snort from the bottle. This one hit a little easier and spread its warmth farther.