It (159 page)

“Christ, Eddie, what happened to—”

“Oh my God!” Ben cried. He had seen Henry on the floor.

“B-B-Be quh-hiet!” Bill said sharply. “And close th-the d-door!”

Richie did it, his eyes fixed on the body. “Henry?”

Ben took three steps toward the corpse and then stopped, as if afraid it might bite him. He looked helplessly at Bill.

“Y-Y-You t-tell,” he said to Eddie. “G-G-Goddam stuh-huh-hutter is g-getting wuh-wuh-worse all the t-t-time.”

Eddie sketched in what had happened while Beverly hunted up the number for the Derry Public Library and called it. She expected that perhaps Mike had fallen asleep there—he might even have a bunk in his office. What she did not expect was what happened: the phone was picked up on the second ring and a voice she had never heard before said hello.

“Hello,” she answered, looking toward the others and making a shushing gesture with one hand. “Is Mr. Hanlon there?”

“Who's this?” the voice asked.

She wet her lips with her tongue. Bill was looking at her piercingly. Ben and Richie had looked around. The beginnings of real alarm stirred inside her.

“Who are
you?”
she countered. “You're not Mr. Hanlon.”

“I'm Derry Chief of Police Andrew Rademacher,” the voice said. “Mr. Hanlon is at the Derry Home Hospital right now. He was assaulted and badly wounded a short time ago. Now who are you, please? I want your name.”

But she barely heard this last. Waves of shock rode through her, lifting her dizzily up and up, outside of herself. The muscles in her stomach and legs and crotch all went loose and numb, and she thought in a detached way:
This must be how it happens, when people get so scared they wet their pants. Sure. You just lose control of those muscles—

“How badly has he been hurt?” she heard herself asking in a papery voice, and then Bill was beside her, his hand on her shoulder, and Ben was there, and Richie, and she felt such a rush of gratitude for them. She held her free hand out and Bill took it. Richie placed his hand over Bill's and Ben put his over Richie's. Eddie had come over, and now he put his good hand on top.

“I want your name, please,” Rademacher said briskly, and for a moment the skittering little craven inside of her, the one that had been bred by her father and cared for by her husband, almost answered:
I'm Beverly Marsh and I'm at the Derry Town House. Please send Mr. Nell over. There's a dead man here who's still half a boy and we're all very frightened.

She said: “I . . . I'm afraid I can't tell you. Not just yet.”

“What do you know about this?”

“Nothing,” she said, shocked. “What makes you think I do? Jesus Christ!”

“You just make a habit of calling the library every morning about three-thirty,” Rademacher said, “is that it? Can the bullshit, young lady. This is assault, and the way the guy looks, it could be murder by the time the sun comes up. I'll ask you again: who are you and how much do you know about this?”

Closing her eyes, gripping Bill's hand with all her strength, she
asked again: “He might die? You're not just saying that to scare me? He really might die? Please tell me.”

“He's very badly hurt. And if that doesn't scare you, miss, it ought to. Now I want to know who you are and why—”

As if in a dream she watched her hand float through space and drop the phone back into the cradle. She looked over at Henry and felt shock as keen as a slap from a cold hand. One of Henry's eyes had closed. The other one, the shattered one, oozed as nakedly as before.

Henry seemed to be winking at her.

Richie called the hospital. Bill led Beverly over to the bed, where she sat with Eddie, looking off into space. She thought she would cry, but no tears came. The only feeling she was strongly and immediately aware of was a wish that someone would cover Henry Bowers. That winky look was really not cool at all.

In one giddy instant Richie became a reporter from the Derry
News.
He understood that Mr. Michael Hanlon, the town's head librarian, had been assaulted while working late. Did the hospital have any word on Mr. Hanlon's condition?

Richie listened, nodding.

“I understand, Mr. Kerpaskian—do you spell that with two k's? You do. Okay. And you are—”

He listened, now enough into his own fiction to make doodling motions with one finger, as if writing on a pad.

“Uh-huh . . . uh-huh . . . yes. Yes, I understand. Well, what we usually do in cases like this is to quote you as ‘a source.' Then, later on, we can . . . uh-huh . . . right! Just right!” Richie laughed heartily and armed a film of sweat from his forehead. He listened again. “Okay, Mr. Kerpaskian. Yes. I'll . . . yes, I got it, K-E-R-P-A-S-K-I-A-N, right! Czech Jewish, is it? Really! That's . . . that's most unusual. Yes, I will. Goodnight. Thank you.”

He hung up and closed his eyes. “Jesus!” he cried in a thick, low voice. “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” He made as if to shove the phone off the table and then simply let his hand fall. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his pajama top.

“He's alive, but in grave condition,” he told the others. “Henry sliced him up like a Christmas turkey. One of the cuts chopped into his femoral artery and he's lost all the blood a man can and still stay alive. Mike managed to get some kind of tourniquet on it, or he would have been dead when they found him.”

Beverly began to cry. She did it like a child, with both hands plastered to her face. For a little while her hitching sobs and the rapid whistle of Eddie's breathing were the only sounds in the room.

“Mike wasn't the only one who got sliced up like a Christmas turkey,” Eddie said at last. “Henry looked like he just went twelve rounds with Rocky Balboa in a Cuisinart.”

“D-Do you still w-w-want to g-g-go to the p-p-police, Bev?”

There were Kleenex on the nighttable but they were a caked and sodden mass in the middle of a puddle of Perrier. She went into the bathroom, making a wide circle around Henry, got a washcloth, and ran cool water on it. It felt delicious against her hot puffy face. She felt that she could think clearly again—not rationally but clearly. She was suddenly sure that rationality would kill them if they tried to use it now. That cop. Rademacher. He had been suspicious. Why not? People didn't call the library at three-thirty in the morning. He had assumed some guilty knowledge. What would he assume if he found out that she had called him from a room where there was a dead man on the floor with a jagged bottleneck planted in his guts? That she and four other strangers had just come into town the day before for a little reunion and this guy just happened to drop by? Would she buy the tale if the shoe were on the other foot? Would anyone? Of course, they could buttress their tale by adding that they had come back to finish the monster that lived in the drains under the city.
That
would certainly add a convincing note of gritty realism.

She came out of the bathroom and looked at Bill. “No,” she said. “I don't want to go to the police. I think Eddie's right—something might happen to us. Something final. But that isn't the real reason.” She looked at the four of them. “We swore it,” she said. “We swore. Bill's brother . . . Stan . . . all the others . . . and now Mike. I'm ready, Bill.”

Bill looked at the others.

Richie nodded. “Okay, Big Bill. Let's try.”

Ben said, “The odds look worse than ever. We're two short now.”

Bill said nothing.

“Okay.” Ben nodded. “She's right. We swore.”

“E-E-Eddie?”

Eddie smiled wanly. “I guess I get another pigger-back down that ladder, huh? If the ladder's still there.”

“No one throwing rocks this time, though,” Beverly said. “They're dead. All three of them.”

“Do we do it now, Bill?” Richie asked.

“Y-Y-Yes,” Bill said. “I th-think this is the t-t-time.”

“Can I say something?” Ben asked abruptly.

Bill looked at him and grinned a little. “A-A-Any time.”

“You guys are still the best friends I ever had,” Ben said. “No matter how this turns out. I just . . . you know, wanted to tell you that.”

He looked around at them, and they looked solemnly back at him.

“I'm glad I remembered you,” he added. Richie snorted. Beverly giggled. Then they were all laughing, looking at each other in the old way, in spite of the fact that Mike was in the hospital, perhaps dying or already dead, in spite of the fact that Eddie's arm was broken (again), in spite of the fact that it was the deepest ditch of the morning.

“Haystack, you have
such
a way with words,” Richie said, laughing and wiping his eyes.
“He
should have been the writer, Big Bill.”

Still smiling a little, Bill said: “And on that nuh-nuh-note—”

They took Eddie's borrowed limo. Richie drove. The groundfog was thicker now, drifting through the streets like cigarette smoke, not quite reaching the hooded streetlamps. The stars overhead were bright chips of ice, spring stars . . . but by cocking his head to the half-open window on the passenger side, Bill thought he could hear summer thunder in the distance. Rain was being ordered up somewhere over the horizon.

Richie turned on the radio and there was Gene Vincent singing “Be-Bop-A-Lula.” He hit one of the other buttons and got Buddy Holly. A third punch brought Eddie Cochran singing “Summertime Blues.”

“I'd like to help you, son, but you're too young to vote,” a deep voice said.

“Turn it off, Richie,” Beverly said softly.

He reached for it, and then his hand froze. “Stay tuned for more of the Richie Tozier All-Dead Rock Show!” the clown's laughing, screaming voice cried over the finger-pops and guitar-chops of the Eddie Cochran tune. “Don't touch that dial, keep it tuned to the rockpile, they're gone from the charts but not from our hearts and you keep coming, come right along, come on everybody! We play
aaaalll
the hits down here!
Aaallllll
the hits! And if you don't believe me, just listen to this morning's graveyard-shift guest deejay, Georgie Denbrough! Tell em, Georgie!”

And suddenly Bill's brother was wailing out of the radio.

“You sent me out and It killed me! I thought It was in the cellar, Big Bill, I thought It was in the cellar but It was in the drain, It was in the drain and It killed me, you let It kill me, Big Bill, you let It—”

Richie snapped the radio off so hard the knob spun away and hit the floormat.

“Rock and roll in the sticks really sucks,” he said. His voice was not quite steady. “Bev's right, we'll leave it off, what do you say?”

No one replied. Bill's face was pale and still and thoughtful under the glow of the passing streetlamps, and when the thunder muttered again in the west they all heard it.

Same old bridge.

Richie parked beside it and they got out and moved to the railing—same old railing—and looked down.

Same old Barrens.

It seemed untouched by the last twenty-seven years; to Bill the turnpike overpass, which was the only new feature, looked unreal, something as ephemeral as a matte painting or a rear-screen projection effect in a movie. Cruddy little trees and scrub bushes glimmered in the twining fog and Bill thought:
I guess this is what we mean when we talk about the persistence of memory, this or something like
this, something you see at the right time and from the right angle, image that kicks off emotion like a jet engine. You see it so clear that all the things which happened in between are gone. If desire is what closes the circle between world and want, then the circle has closed.

“Cuh-Cuh-Come on,” he said, and climbed over the railing. They followed him down the embankment in a scatter of scree and pebbles. When they reached the bottom Bill checked automatically for Silver and then laughed at himself. Silver was leaning against the wall of Mike's garage. It seemed Silver had no part to play in this at all, although that was strange, after the way it had turned up.

“Tuh-Take us there,” Bill told Ben.

Ben looked at him and Bill read the thought in his eyes—
It's been twenty-seven years, Bill, dream on
—and then he nodded and headed into the undergrowth.

The path—
their
path—had long since grown over, and they had to force themselves through tangles of thornbushes, prickers, and wild hydrangea so fragrant it was cloying. Crickets sang somnolently all around them, and a few lightning-bugs, early arrivals at summer's luscious party, poked at the dark. Bill supposed kids still played down here, but they had made their own runs and secret ways.

They came to the clearing where the clubhouse had been, but now there was no clearing here at all. Bushes and lackluster scrub pines had reclaimed it all.

“Look,” Ben whispered, and crossed the clearing (in their memories it was still here, simply overlaid with another of those matte paintings). He yanked at something. It was the mahogany door they had found on the edge of the dump, the one they had used to finish off the clubhouse roof. It had been cast aside here and looked as if it hadn't been touched in a dozen years or more. Creepers were firmly entrenched across its dirty surface.

“Leave it alone, Haystack,” Richie murmured. “It's old.”

“Tuh-Tuh-Take us th-there, B-Ben,” Bill repeated from behind them.

So they went down to the Kenduskeag following him, bearing left away from the clearing that didn't exist anymore. The sound of running water grew steadily louder, but they still almost fell into the Kenduskeag before any of them saw it: the foliage had grown up in a tangled wall on the edge of the embankment. The edge broke off
under the heels of Ben's cowboy boots and Bill yanked him back by the scruff of the neck.