It (50 page)

There were tramps and hobos sometimes, though. If anything
about the trainyards scared Eddie, they did—men with unshaven cheeks and cracked skin and blisters on their hands and coldsores on their lips. They rode the rails for awhile and then climbed down for awhile and spent some time in Derry and then got on another train and went somewhere else. Sometimes they had missing fingers. Usually they were drunk and wanted to know if you had a cigarette.

One of these fellows had crawled out from under the porch of the house at 29 Neibolt Street one day and had offered to give Eddie a blowjob for a quarter. Eddie had backed away, his skin like ice, his mouth as dry as lintballs. One of the hobo's nostrils had been eaten away. You could look right into the red, scabby channel.

“I don't have a quarter,” Eddie said, backing toward his bike.

“I'll do it for a dime,” the hobo croaked, coming toward him. He was wearing old green flannel pants. Yellow puke was stiffening across the lap. He unzipped his fly and reached inside. He was trying to grin. His nose was a red horror.

“I . . . I don't have a dime, either,” Eddie said, and suddenly thought:
Oh my God he's got leprosy! If he touches me I'll catch it too!
His control snapped and he ran. He heard the hobo break into a shuffling run behind him, his old string-tied shoes slapping and flapping across the riotous lawn of the empty saltbox house.

“Come back here, kid! I'll blow you for free. Come back here!”

Eddie had leaped on his bike, wheezing now, feeling his throat closing up to a pinhole. His chest had taken on weight. He hit the pedals and was just picking up speed when one of the hobo's hands struck the package carrier. The bike shimmied. Eddie looked over his shoulder and saw the hobo running along behind the rear wheel (
!!GAINING!!
), his lips drawn back from the black stumps of his teeth in an expression which might have been either desperation or fury.

In spite of the stones lying on his chest Eddie had pedaled even faster, expecting that one of the hobo's scab-crusted hands would close over his arm at any moment, pulling him from his Raleigh and dumping him in the ditch, where God knew what would happen to him. He hadn't dared look around until he had flashed past the Church School and through the Route 2 intersection. The 'bo was gone.

Eddie held this terrible story inside him for almost a week and
then confided it to Richie Tozier and Bill Denbrough one day when they were reading comics over the garage.

“He didn't have leprosy, you dummy,” Richie said. “He had the Syph.”

Eddie looked at Bill to see if Richie was ribbing him—he had never heard of a disease called the Sift before. It sounded like something Richie might have made up.

“Is there such a thing as the Sift, Bill?”

Bill nodded gravely. “Only it's the Suh-Suh-
Syph
, not the Sift. It's s-short for syphilis.”

“What's that?”

“It's a disease you get from fucking,” Richie said. “You know about fucking, don't you, Eds?”

“Sure,” Eddie said. He hoped he wasn't blushing. He knew that when you got older, stuff came out of your penis when it was hard. Vincent “Boogers” Taliendo had filled him in on the rest one day at school. What you did when you fucked, according to Boogers, was you rubbed your cock against a girl's stomach until it got hard (your cock, not the girl's stomach). Then you rubbed some more until you started to “get the feeling.” When Eddie asked what that meant, Boogers had only shaken his head in a mysterious way. Boogers said that you couldn't describe it, but you'd know it as soon as you got it. He said you could practice by lying in the bathtub and rubbing your cock with Ivory soap (Eddie had tried this, but the only feeling he got was the need to urinate after awhile). Anyway, Boogers went on, after you “got the feeling,” this stuff came out of your penis. Most kids called it come, Boogers said, but his big brother had told him that the really scientific word for it was jizzum. And when you “got the feeling,” you had to grab your cock and aim it real fast so you could shoot the jizzum into the girl's bellybutton as soon as it came out. It went down into her stomach and made a baby there.

Do girls
like
that?
Eddie had asked Boogers Taliendo. He himself was sort of appalled.

I guess they must,
Boogers had replied, looking mystified himself.

“Now listen up, Eds,” Richie said, “because there may be questions later. Some women have got this disease. Some men, too, but mostly it's women. A guy can get it from a woman—”

“Or another g-g-guy if they're kwuh-kwuh-queer,” Bill added.

“Right. The important thing is you get the Syph from screwing someone who's already got it.”

“What does it do?” Eddie asked.

“Makes you rot,” Richie said simply.

Eddie stared at him, horrified.

“It's bad, I know, but it's true,” Richie said. “Your nose is the first thing to go. Some guys with the Syph, their noses fall right off. Then their cocks.”

“Puh-Puh-Puh-leeze,” Bill said. “I just a-a-ate.”

“Hey, man, this is science,” Richie said.

“So what's the difference between leprosy and the Syph?” Eddie asked.

“You don't get leprosy from fucking,” Richie said promptly, and then went off into a gale of laughter that left both Bill and Eddie mystified.

Following that day the house at 29 Neibolt Street had taken on a kind of glow in Eddie's imagination. Looking at its weedy yard and its slumped porch and the boards nailed across its windows, he would feel an unhealthy fascination take hold of him. And six weeks ago he had parked his bike on the gravelly verge of the street (the sidewalk ended four houses farther back) and walked across the lawn toward the porch of that house.

His heart had been beating hard in his chest, and his mouth had that dry taste again—listening to Bill's story of the dreadful picture, he knew that what he had felt when approaching that house was about the same as what Bill had felt going into George's room. He did not feel as if he was in control of himself. He felt
pushed.

It did not seem as if his feet were moving; instead the house itself, brooding and silent, seemed to draw closer to where he stood.

Faintly, he could hear a diesel engine in the trainyard—that and the liquid-metallic slam of couplings being made. They were shunting some cars onto sidings, picking up others. Making a train.

His hand gripped his aspirator, but, oddly, his asthma had not closed down as it had on the day he fled from the hobo with the rotted
nose. There was only that sense of standing still and watching the house slide stealthily toward him, as if on a hidden track.

Eddie looked under the porch. There was no one there. It was not really surprising. This was spring, and hobos showed up most frequently in Derry from late September to early November. During those six weeks or so a man could pick up day-work on one of the outlying farms if he looked even half-decent. There were potatoes and apples to pick, snow-fence to string, barn and shed roofs which needed to be patched before December came along, whistling up winter.

No hobos under the porch, but plenty of sign they had been there. Empty beer cans, empty beer bottles, empty liquor bottles. A dirt-crusted blanket lay against the brick foundation like a dead dog. There were drifts of crumpled newspapers and one old shoe and a smell like garbage. There were thick layers of old leaves under there.

Not wanting to do it but unable to help himself, Eddie had crawled under the porch. He could feel his heartbeat slamming in his head now, driving white spots of light across his field of vision.

The smell was worse underneath—booze and sweat and the dark brown perfume of decaying leaves. The old leaves didn't even crackle under his hands and knees. They and the old newspapers only sighed.

I'm a hobo,
Eddie thought incoherently.
I'm a hobo and I ride the rods. That's what I do. Ain't got no money, ain't got no home, but I got me a bottle and a dollar and a place to sleep. I'll pick apples this week and potatoes the week after that and when the frost locks up the ground like money inside a bank vault, why, I'll hop a GS&WM box that smells of sugar-beets and I'll sit in the corner and pull some hay over me if there is some and I'll drink me a little drink and chew me a little chew and sooner or later I'll get to Portland or Beantown, and if I don't get busted by a railroad security dick I'll hop one of those 'Bama Star boxes and head down south and when I get there I'll pick lemons or limes or oranges. And if I get vagged I'll build roads for tourists to ride on. Hell, I done it before, ain't I? I'm just a lonesome old hobo, ain't got no money, ain't got no home, but I got me one thing; I got me a disease that's eating me up. My skin's cracking open, my teeth are falling out, and you know what? I can feel myself turning bad like an apple that's going soft, I can
feel
it happening, eating from the inside to the out, eating, eating, eating me.

Eddie pulled the stiffening blanket aside, tweezing at it with his
thumb and forefinger, grimacing at its matted feel. One of those low cellar windows was directly behind it, one pane broken, the other opaque with dirt. He leaned forward, now feeling almost hypnotized. He leaned closer to the window, closer to the cellar-darkness, breathing in that smell of age and must and dry-rot, closer and closer to the black, and surely the leper would have caught him if his asthma hadn't picked that exact moment to kick up. It cramped his lungs with a weight that was painless yet frightening; his breath at once took on the familiar hateful whistling sound.

He drew back, and that was when the face appeared. Its coming was so sudden, so startling (and yet at the same time so
expected),
that Eddie could not have screamed even if he hadn't been having an asthma attack. His eyes bulged. His mouth creaked open. It was not the hobo with the flayed nose, but there were resemblances. Terrible resemblances. And yet . . . this thing could not be human. Nothing could be so eaten up and remain alive.

The skin of its forehead was split open. White bone, coated with a membrane of yellow mucusy stuff, peered through like the lens of a bleary searchlight. The nose was a bridge of raw gristle above two red flaring channels. One eye was a gleeful blue. The other socket was filled with a mass of spongy brown-black tissue. The leper's lower lip sagged like liver. It had no upper lip at all; its teeth poked out in a sneering ring.

It shot one hand out through the broken pane. It shot the other through the dirty glass to the left, shattering it to fragments. Its questing, clutching hands crawled with sores. Beetles crawled and lumbered busily to and fro.

Mewling, gasping, Eddie hunched his way backward. He could hardly breathe. His heart was a runaway engine in his chest. The leper appeared to be wearing the ragged remains of some strange silvery suit. Things were crawling in the straggles of its brown hair.

“How bout a blowjob, Eddie?” the apparition croaked, grinning with its remains of a mouth. It lilted, “Bobby does it for a dime, he will do it anytime, fifteen cents for overtime.” It winked. “That's me, Eddie—Bob Gray. And now that we've been properly introduced . . .” One of its hands splatted against Eddie's right shoulder. Eddie screamed thinly.

“That's all right,” the leper said, and Eddie saw with dreamlike terror that it was crawling out of the window. The bony shield behind its peeling forehead snapped the thin wooden strip between the two panes. Its hands clawed through the leafy, mulchy earth. The silver shoulders of its suit . . . costume . . . whatever it was . . . began to push through the gap. That one glaring blue eye never left Eddie's face.

“Here I come, Eddie, that's all right,” it croaked. “You'll like it down here with us. Some of your friends are down here.”

Its hand reached out again, and in some corner of his panic-maddened, screaming mind, Eddie was suddenly, coldly sure that if that thing touched his bare skin, he would begin to rot, too. The thought broke his paralysis. He skittered backward on his hands and knees, then turned and lunged for the far end of the porch. Sunlight, falling in narrow dusty beams through the cracks between the porch boards, striped his face from moment to moment. His head pushed through the dusty cobwebs that settled in his hair. He looked back over his shoulder and saw that the leper was halfway out.

“It won't do you any good to run, Eddie,” it called.

Eddie had reached the far end of the porch. There was a latticework skirt here. The sun shone through it, printing diamonds of light on his cheeks and forehead. He lowered his head and slammed into it with no hesitation at all, tearing the entire skirt free with a scream of rusted ha'penny nails. There was a tangle of rosebushes beyond and Eddie tore through these, stumbling to his feet as he did so, not feeling the thorns that scrawled shallow cuts along his arms and cheeks and neck.

He turned and backed away on buckling legs, pulling his aspirator out of his pocket, triggering it. Surely it hadn't really happened? He had been thinking about that hobo and his mind had . . . well, had just

(put on a show)

shown him a movie, a horror movie, like one of those Saturday- matinee pictures with Frankenstein and Wolfman that they had sometimes at the Bijou or the Gem or the Aladdin. Sure, that was all. He had scared himself! What an asshole!

There was even time to utter a shaky laugh at the unsuspected
vividness of his imagination before the rotting hands shot out from under the porch, clawing at the rosebushes with mindless ferocity, pulling at them, stripping them, printing beads of blood on them.

Eddie shrieked.

The leper was crawling out. It was wearing a clown suit, he saw—a clown suit with big orange buttons down the front. It saw Eddie and grinned. Its half-mouth dropped open and its tongue lolled out. Eddie shrieked again, but no one could have heard one boy's breathless shriek under the pounding of the diesel engine in the trainyard. The leper's tongue had not just dropped from its mouth; it was at least three feet long and had unrolled like a party-favor. It came to an arrow-point which dragged in the dirt. Foam, thick-sticky and yellowish, coursed along it. Bugs crawled over it.