It (77 page)

He shook his head. Fragments. Straws in the wind. That was all.

The field was gone now, as were the remains of the Ironworks. Bill remembered the great chimney of the Ironworks suddenly. Faced with tile, caked black with soot for the final ten feet of its length, it had lain in the high grass like a gigantic pipe. They had scrambled up somehow and had walked along it, arms held out like tightwire walkers, laughing—

He shook his head, as if to dismiss the mirage of the mall, an ugly collection of buildings with signs that said
SEARS
and
J. C. PENNEY
and
WOOLWORTH'S
and
CVS
and
YORK'S STEAK HOUSE
and
WALDENBOOKS
and dozens of others. Roads wove in and out of parking lots. The mall did not go away, because it was no mirage. The Kitchener Ironworks was gone, and the field that had grown up around its ruins was likewise gone. The mall was the reality, not the memories.

But somehow he didn't believe that.

“Here you go, mister,” the cabbie said. He pulled into the parking-lot of a building that looked like a large plastic pagoda. “A little late, but better late than never, am I right?”

“Indeed you are,” Bill said. He gave the cab-driver a five. “Keep the change.”

“Good fucking deal!” the cabbie exclaimed. “You need someone to drive you, call Big Yellow and ask for Dave. Ask for me by name.”

“I'll just ask for the religious fella,” Bill said, grinning. “The one who's got his plot all picked out in Mount Hope.”

“You got it,” Dave said, laughing. “Have a good one, mister.”

“You too, Dave.”

He stood in the light rain for a moment, watching the cab draw away. He realized that he had meant to ask the driver one more question, and had forgotten—perhaps on purpose.

He had meant to ask Dave if he
liked
living in Derry.

Abruptly, Bill Denbrough turned and walked into the Jade of the Orient. Mike Hanlon was in the lobby, sitting in a wicker chair with a huge flaring back. He got to his feet, and Bill felt deep unreality wash over him—
through
him. That sensation of doubling was back, but now it was much, much worse.

He remembered a boy who had been about five feet three, trim, and agile. Before him was a man who stood about five-seven. He was skinny. His clothes seemed to hang on him. And the lines in his face said that he was on the darker side of forty instead of only thirty-eight or so.

Bill's shock must have shown on his face, because Mike said quietly: “I know how I look.”

Bill flushed and said, “It's not that bad, Mike, it's just that I remember you as a kid. That's all it is.”

“Is it?”

“You look a little tired.”

“I
am
a little tired,” Mike said, “but I'll make it. I guess.” He smiled then, and the smile lit his face. In it Bill saw the boy he had known twenty-seven years ago. As the old woodframe Home Hospital had been overwhelmed with modern glass and cinderblock, so had the boy that Bill had known been overwhelmed with the inevitable accessories of adulthood. There were wrinkles on his forehead, lines had grooved themselves from the corners of his mouth nearly to his
chin, and his hair was graying on both sides above the ears. But as the old hospital, although overwhelmed, was still there, still visible, so was the boy Bill had known.

Mike stuck out his hand and said, “Welcome back to Derry, Big Bill.”

Bill ignored the hand and embraced Mike. Mike hugged him back fiercely, and Bill could feel his hair, stiff and kinky, against his own shoulder and the side of his neck.

“Whatever's wrong, Mike, we'll take care of it,” Bill said. He heard the rough sound of tears in his throat and didn't care. “We beat it once, and we can b-beat it a-a-again.”

Mike pulled away from him, held him at arm's length; although he was still smiling, there was too much sparkle in his eyes. He took out his handkerchief and wiped them. “Sure, Bill,” he said. “You bet.”

“Would you gentlemen like to follow me?” the hostess asked. She was a smiling Oriental woman in a delicate pink kimono upon which a dragon cavorted and curled its plated tail. Her dark hair was piled high on her head and held with ivory combs.

“I know the way, Rose,” Mike said.

“Very good, Mr. Hanlon.” She smiled at both of them. “You are well met in friendship, I think.”

“I think we are,” Mike said. “This way, Bill.”

He led him down a dim corridor, past the main dining room and toward a door where a beaded curtain hung.

“The others—?” Bill began.

“All here now,” Mike said. “All that could come.”

Bill hesitated for a moment outside the door, suddenly frightened. It was not the unknown that scared him, not the supernatural; it was the simple knowledge that he was fifteen inches taller than he had been in 1958 and minus most of his hair. He was suddenly uneasy—almost terrified—at the thought of seeing them all again, their children's faces almost worn away, almost buried under change as the old hospital had been buried. Banks erected inside their heads where once magic picture-palaces had stood.

We grew up,
he thought.
We didn't think it would happen, not then, not to us. But it did, and if I go in there it will be real: we're all grownups now.

He looked at Mike, suddenly bewildered and timid. “How do they
look?” he heard himself asking in a faltering voice. “Mike . . . how do they look?”

“Come in and find out,” Mike said, kindly enough, and led Bill into the small private room.

Perhaps it was simply the dimness of the room that caused the illusion, which lasted for only the briefest moment, but Bill wondered later if it wasn't some sort of message meant strictly for him: that fate could also be kind.

In that brief moment it seemed to him that
none
of them had grown up, that his friends had somehow done a Peter Pan act and were all still children.

Richie Tozier was rocked back in his chair so that he was leaning against the wall, caught in the act of saying something to Beverly Marsh, who had a hand cupped over her mouth to hide a giggle; Richie had a wise-ass grin on his face that was perfectly familiar. There was Eddie Kaspbrak, sitting on Beverly's left, and in front of him on the table, next to his water-glass, was a plastic squeezebottle with a pistol-grip handle curving down from its top. The trimmings were a little more state-of-the-art, but the purpose was obviously the same: it was an aspirator. Sitting at one end of the table, watching this trio with an expression of mixed anxiety, amusement, and concentration, was Ben Hanscom.

Bill found his hand wanting to go to his head and realized with a sorry kind of amusement that in that second he had almost rubbed his pate to see if his hair had magically come back—that red, fine hair that he had begun to lose when he was only a college sophomore.

That broke the bubble. Richie was not wearing glasses, he saw, and thought:
He probably has contacts now—he would. He hated those glasses.
The tee-shirts and cord pants he'd habitually worn had been replaced by a suit that hadn't been purchased off any rack—Bill estimated that he was looking at nine hundred dollars' worth of tailor-made on the hoof.

Beverly Marsh (if her name still
was
Marsh) had become a stun
ningly beautiful woman. Instead of the casual pony-tail, her hair—which was almost exactly the same shade his own had been—spilled over the shoulders of her plain white Ship 'n Shore blouse in a torrent of subdued color. In this dim light it merely glowed like a well-banked bed of embers. In daylight, even the light of such a subdued day as this one, Bill imagined it would flame. And he found himself wondering what it would feel like to plunge his hands into that hair.
The world's oldest story,
he thought wryly.
I love my wife but oh you kid.

Eddie—it was weird but true—had grown up to look quite a little bit like Anthony Perkins. His face was prematurely lined (although in his movements he seemed somehow younger than either Richie or Ben) and made older still by the rimless spectacles he wore—spectacles you would imagine a British barrister wearing as he approached the bench or leafed through a legal brief. His hair was short, worn in an out-of-date style that had been known as Ivy League in the late fifties and early sixties. He was wearing a loud checked sportcoat that looked like something grabbed from the Distress Sale rack of a men's clothing store that would shortly be out of business. . . . but the watch on one wrist was a Patek Philippe, and the ring on the little finger of his right hand was a ruby. The stone was too hugely vulgar and too ostentatious to be anything but real.

Ben was the one who had really changed, and, looking at him again, Bill felt unreality wash easily over him. His face was the same, and his hair, although graying and longer, was combed in the same unusual right-side part. But Ben had gotten thin. He sat easily enough in his chair, his unadorned leather vest open to show the blue chambray work-shirt beneath. He wore Levi's with straight legs, cowboy boots, and a wide belt with a beaten-silver buckle. These clothes clung easily to a body which was slim and narrow-hipped. He wore a bracelet with heavy links on one wrist—not gold links but copper ones.
He got thin,
Bill thought.
He's a shadow of his former self, so to speak. . . . Ole Ben got thin. Wonders never cease.

There was a moment of silence among the six of them that was beyond description. It was one of the strangest moments Bill Denbrough ever passed in his life. Stan was not here, but a seventh had come, nonetheless. Here in this private restaurant dining room Bill felt its presence so fully that it was almost personified—but not as an old man in a white robe with a scythe on his shoulder. It was the
white spot on the map which lay between 1958 and 1985, an area an explorer might have called the Great Don't Know. Bill wondered what exactly was there. Beverly Marsh in a short skirt which showed most of her long, coltish legs, a Beverly Marsh in white go-go boots, her hair parted in the middle and ironed? Richie Tozier carrying a sign which said
STOP THE WAR
on one side and
GET ROTC OFF CAMPUS
on the other? Ben Hanscom in a yellow hard-hat with a flag decal on the front, running a bulldozer under a canvas parasol, his shirt off, showing a stomach which protruded less and less over the waistband of his pants? Was this seventh creature black? No relation to either H. Rap Brown or Grandmaster Flash, not this fellow, this fellow wore plain white shirts and fade-into-the-woodwork J. C. Penney slacks, and he sat in a library carrell at the University of Maine, writing papers on the origin of footnotes and the possible advantages of ISBN numbers in book cataloguing while the marchers marched outside and Phil Ochs sang “Richard Nixon find yourself another country to be part of” and men died with their stomachs blown out for villages whose names they could not pronounce; he sat there studiously bent over his work (Bill
saw
him), which lay in a slant of crisp white winterlight, his face sober and absorbed, knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity's engine. Was he the seventh? Or was it a young man standing before his mirror, looking at the way his forehead was growing, looking at a combful of pulled-out red hairs, looking at a pile of university notebooks on the desk reflected in the mirror, notebooks which held the completed, messy first draft of a novel entitled
Joanna,
which would be published a year later?

Some of the above, all of the above, none of the above.

It didn't matter, really. The seventh was there, and in that one moment they all felt it . . . and perhaps understood best the dreadful power of the thing that had brought them back.
It lives,
Bill thought, cold inside his clothes.
Eye of newt, tail of dragon, Hand of Glory . . . whatever It was, It's here again, in Derry. It.

And he felt suddenly that
It
was the seventh; that It and time were somehow interchangeable, that It wore all their faces as well as the thousand others with which It had terrified and killed . . . and the idea that
It
might be
them
was somehow the most frightening idea of all.
How much of us was left behind here?
he thought with sudden rising
terror.
How much of us never left the drains and the sewers where It lived . . . and where It fed? Is that why we forgot? Because part of each of us never had any future, never grew, never left Derry? Is that why?

He saw no answers on their faces . . . only his own questions reflected back at him.

Thoughts form and pass in a matter of seconds or milliseconds, and create their own time-frames, and all of this passed through Bill Denbrough's mind in a space of no more than five seconds.

Then Richie Tozier, leaning back against the wall, grinned again and said: “Oh my, look at this—Bill Denbrough went for the chrome dome look. How long you been Turtle Waxing your head, Big Bill?”

And Bill, with no idea at all of what might come out, opened his mouth and heard himself say: “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Trashmouth.”

There was a moment of silence—and then the room exploded with laughter. Bill crossed to them and began to shake hands, and while there was something horrible in what he now felt, there was also something comforting about it: this sensation of having come home for good.

Mike Hanlon ordered drinks, and as if to make up for the prior silence, everyone began to talk at once. Beverly Marsh was now Beverly Rogan, it turned out. She said she was married to a wonderful man in Chicago who had turned her whole life around and who had, by some benign magic, been able to transform his wife's simple talent for sewing into a successful dress business. Eddie Kaspbrak owned a limousine company in New York. “For all I know, my wife could be in bed with Al Pacino right now,” he said, smiling mildly, and the room broke up.