It (6 page)

Boutillier and Rademacher exchanged a glance. Boutillier raised a single finger and tapped it against his cheek: although this doofus in the engineer boots didn't know it, he was now talking about first-degree murder.

“So I goes no, I gotta get home, and Webby goes, You scared to go by that queer-bar? And I go, Fuck no! And Steve's still high or something, and he says, Let's go grease some queermeat! Let's go grease some queermeat! Let's go grease . . .”

The timing was just right enough so that things worked out wrong for everyone. Adrian Mellon and Don Hagarty came out of the Falcon after two beers, walked up past the bus station, and then linked hands. Neither of them thought about it; it was just something they did. It was ten-twenty. They reached the corner and turned left.

The Kissing Bridge was almost half a mile upriver from here; they meant to cross Main Street Bridge, which was much less picturesque. The Kenduskeag was summer-low, no more than four feet of water sliding listlessly around the concrete pilings.

When the Duster drew abreast of them (Steve Dubay had spotted the two of them coming out of the Falcon and gleefully pointed them out), they were on the edge of the span.

“Cut in! Cut in!” Webby Garton screamed. The two men had just passed under a streetlight and he had spotted the fact that they were holding hands. This infuriated him . . . but not as much as the hat infuriated him. The big paper flower was nodding crazily this way and that. “Cut in, goddammit!”

And Steve did.

Chris Unwin would deny active participation in what followed, but Don Hagarty told a different story. He said that Garton was out of the car almost before it stopped, and that the other two quickly followed. There was talk. Not good talk. There was no attempt at flippancy or false coquetry on Adrian's part this night; he recognized that they were in a lot of trouble.

“Give me that hat,” Garton said. “Give it to me, queer.”

“If I do, will you leave us alone?” Adrian was wheezing with fright, almost crying, looking from Unwin to Dubay to Garton with terrified eyes.

“Just give me the fucker!”

Adrian handed it over. Garton produced a switchknife from the left front pocket of his jeans and cut it into two pieces. He rubbed the pieces against the seat of his jeans. Then he dropped them to his feet and stomped them.

Don Hagarty backed away a little while their attention was divided between Adrian and the hat—he was looking, he said, for a cop.

“Now will you let us al—” Adrian Mellon began, and that was when Garton punched him in the face, driving him back against the waist-high pedestrian railing of the bridge. Adrian screamed, clapping his hands to his mouth. Blood poured through his fingers.

“Ade!”
Hagarty cried, and ran forward again. Dubay tripped him. Garton booted him in the stomach, knocking him off the sidewalk and into the roadway. A car passed. Hagarty rose to his knees and screamed at it. It didn't slow. The driver, he told Gardener and Reeves, never even looked around.

“Shut up, queer!” Dubay said, and kicked him in the side of the face. Hagarty fell on his side in the gutter, semiconscious.

A few moments later he heard a voice—Chris Unwin's—telling him to get away before he got what his friend was getting. In his own statement Unwin verified giving this warning.

Hagarty could hear thudding blows and the sound of his lover screaming. Adrian sounded like a rabbit in a snare, he told the police. Hagarty crawled back toward the intersection and the bright lights of the bus station, and when he was a distance away he turned back to look.

Adrian Mellon, who stood about five-five and might have weighed a hundred and thirty-five pounds soaking wet, was being pushed from Garton to Dubay to Unwin in a kind of triple play. His body jittered and flopped like the body of a rag doll. They were punching him, pummelling him, ripping at his clothes. As he watched, he said, Garton punched Adrian in the crotch. Adrian's hair hung in his face. Blood poured out of his mouth and soaked his shirt. Webby Garton wore two heavy rings on his right hand: one was a Derry High School
ring, the other one he had made in shop class—an intertwined brass DB stood out three inches from this latter. The letters stood for the Dead Bugs, a metal band he particularly admired. The rings had torn Adrian's upper lip open and shattered three of his upper teeth at the gum line.

“Help!”
Hagarty shrieked.
“Help! Help! They're killing him! Help!”

The buildings of Main Street loomed dark and secret. No one came to help—not even from the one white island of light which marked the bus station, and Hagarty did not see how that could be: there were people in there. He had seen them when he and Ade walked past. Would none of them come to help? None at all?

“HELP! HELP! THEY'RE KILLING HIM, HELP, PLEASE, FOR GOD'S SAKE!”

“Help,” a very small voice whispered from Don Hagarty's left . . . and then there was a giggle.

“Bum's rush!”
Garton was yelling now . . . yelling and laughing. All three of them, Hagarty told Gardener and Reeves, had been laughing while they beat Adrian up.
“Bum's rush! Over the side!”

“Bum's rush! Bum's rush! Bum's rush!”
Dubay chanted, laughing.

“Help,” the small voice said again, and although the voice was grave, that little giggle followed again—it was like the voice of a child who cannot help itself.

Hagarty looked down and saw the clown—and it was at this point that Gardener and Reeves began to discount everything that Hagarty said, because the rest was the raving of a lunatic. Later, however, Harold Gardener found himself wondering. Later, when he found that the Unwin boy had also seen a clown—or said he had—he began to have second thoughts. His partner either never had them or would never admit to them.

The clown, Hagarty said, looked like a cross between Ronald McDonald and that old TV clown, Bozo—or so he thought at first. It was the wild tufts of orange hair that brought such comparisons to mind. But later consideration had caused him to think the clown really looked like neither. The smile painted over the white pancake was red, not orange, and the eyes were a weird shiny silver. Contact lenses, perhaps . . . but a part of him thought then and continued to think that maybe that silver had been the real color of those eyes. He
wore a baggy suit with big orange-pompom buttons; on his hands were cartoon gloves.

“If you need help, Don,” the clown said, “help yourself to a balloon.”

And it offered the bunch it held in one hand.

“They float,” the clown said. “Down here we all float; pretty soon your friend will float, too.”

“This clown called you by name,” Jeff Reeves said in a totally expressionless voice. He looked over Hagarty's bent head at Harold Gardener, and one eye drew down in a wink.

“Yes,” Hagarty said, not looking up. “I know how it sounds.”

“So then you threw him over,” Boutillier said. “Bum's rush.”

“Not me!” Unwin said, looking up. He flicked the hair out of his eyes with one hand and stared at them urgently. “When I saw they really meant to do it, I tried to pull Steve away, because I knew the guy might get banged up. . . . It was like ten feet to the water. . . .”

It was twenty-three. One of Chief Rademacher's patrolmen had already measured.

“But it was like he was crazy. The two of them kept yelling ‘Bum's rush! Bum's rush!' and they picked him up. Webby had him under the arms and Steve had him by the seat of the pants, and . . . and . . .”

When Hagarty saw what they were doing, he rushed back toward them, screaming
“No! No! No!”
at the top of his voice.

Chris Unwin pushed him backward and Hagarty landed in a teeth-rattling heap on the sidewalk. “Do you want to go over, too?” he whispered. “You
run,
baby!”

They threw Adrian Mellon over the bridge and into the water then. Hagarty heard the splash.

“Let's get out of here,” Steve Dubay said. He and Webby were backing toward the car.

Chris Unwin went to the railing and looked over. He saw Hagarty first, sliding and clawing his way down the weedy, trash-littered embankment to the water. Then he saw the clown. The clown was dragging Adrian out on the far side with one arm; its balloons were in its other hand. Adrian was dripping wet, choking, moaning. The clown twisted its head and grinned up at Chris. Chris said he saw its shining silver eyes and its bared teeth—great big teeth, he said.

“Like the lion in the circus, man,” he said. “I mean, they were that big.”

Then, he said, he saw the clown shove one of Adrian Mellon's arms back so it lay over his head.

“Then what, Chris?” Boutillier said. He was bored with this part. Fairytales had bored him since the age of eight on.

“I dunno,” Chris said. “That was when Steve grabbed me and hauled me into the car. But . . . I think it bit into his armpit.” He looked up at them again, uncertain now. “I think that's what it did. Bit into his armpit.

“Like it wanted to eat him, man. Like it wanted to eat his heart.”

No, Hagarty said when he was presented with Chris Unwin's story in the form of questions. The clown did not drag Ade up on the far bank, at least not that he saw—and he would grant that he had been something less than a disinterested observer by that point; by that point he had been out of his fucking mind.

The clown, he said, was standing near the far bank with Adrian's dripping body clutched in its arms. Ade's right arm was stuck stiffly out behind the clown's head, and the clown's face was indeed in Ade's right armpit, but it was not biting: it was smiling. Hagarty could see it looking out from beneath Ade's arm and smiling.

The clown's arms tightened, and Hagarty heard ribs splinter.

Ade shrieked.

“Float with us, Don,” the clown said out of its grinning red mouth, and then pointed with one of its white-gloved hands under the bridge.

Balloons floated against the underside of the bridge—not a dozen or a dozen dozens but thousands, red and blue and green and yellow, and printed on the side of each was
I
DERRY
!

“Well now, that surely does sound like a lot of balloons,” Reeves said, and tipped Harold Gardener another wink.

“I know how it sounds,” Hagarty reiterated in the same dreary voice.

“You
saw
those balloons,” Gardener said.

Don Hagarty slowly held his hands up in front of his face. “I saw them as clearly as I can see my own fingers at this moment. Thousands of them. You couldn't even see the underside of the bridge—there were too many of them. They were rippling a little, and sort of bouncing up and down. There was a sound. A funny low squealing noise. That was their sides rubbing together. And strings. There was a forest of white strings hanging down. They looked like white strands of spiderweb. The clown took Ade under there. I could see its suit brushing through those strings. Ade was making awful choking sounds. I started after him . . . and the clown looked back. I saw its eyes, and all at once I understood who it was.”

“Who was it, Don?” Harold Gardener asked softly.

“It was Derry,” Don Hagarty said. “It was this town.”

“And what did you do then?” It was Reeves.

“I ran, you dumb shit,” Hagarty said, and burst into tears.

Harold Gardener kept his peace until November 13th, the day before John Garton and Steven Dubay were to go on trial in Derry District Court for the murder of Adrian Mellon. Then he went to see Tom Boutillier. He wanted to talk about the clown. Boutillier didn't—but
when he saw Gardener might do something stupid without a little guidance, he did.

“There was no clown, Harold. The only clowns out that night were those three kids. You know that as well as I do.”

“We have two witnesses—”

“Oh, that's crap. Unwin decided to bring on the One-Armed Man, as in ‘We didn't kill the poor little faggot, it was the one-armed man,' as soon as he understood he'd really gotten his buns into some hot water this time. Hagarty was hysterical. He stood by and watched those kids murder his best friend. It wouldn't have surprised me if he'd seen flying saucers.”

But Boutillier knew better. Gardener could see it in his eyes, and the Assistant D.A.'s ducking and dodging irritated him.

“Come on,” he said. “We're talking about independent witnesses here. Don't bullshit me.”

“Oh, you want to talk bullshit? Are you telling me you believe there was a vampire clown under the Main Street Bridge? Because that's
my
idea of bullshit.”

“No, not exactly, but—”

“Or that Hagarty saw a billion balloons under there, each imprinted with exactly the same thing as what was written on his lover's hat? Because that is
also
my idea of bullshit.”