It (81 page)

Mike took a drink of water and then passed another picture down the line. This was not a police photograph; it was another school picture. It showed a grinning boy who was maybe thirteen. He was dressed in his best for the school photo and his hands were clean and folded neatly in his lap . . . but there was a devilish little glint in his eyes. He was black.

“Jeffrey Holly,” Mike said. “May 13th. A week after the Cowan boy was killed. Torn open. He was found in Bassey Park, by the Canal.

“Nine days after that, May 22nd, a fifthgrader named John Feury was found dead out on Neibolt Street—”

Eddie uttered a high, quavering scream. He groped for his aspirator and knocked it off the table. It rolled down to Bill, who picked it up. Eddie's face had gone a sickish yellow color. His breath whistled coldly in his throat.

“Get him something to drink!” Ben roared. “Somebody get him—”

But Eddie was shaking his head. He triggered the aspirator down his throat. His chest heaved as he tore in a gulp of air. He triggered the aspirator again and then sat back, eyes half-closed, panting.

“I'll be all right,” he gasped. “Gimme a minute, I'm with you.”

“Eddie, are you sure?” Beverly asked. “Maybe you ought to lie down—”

“I'll be all right,” he repeated querulously. “It was just . . . the shock. You know. The shock. I'd forgotten all about Neibolt Street.”

No one replied; no one had to. Bill thought:
You believe your capacity has been reached, and then Mike produces another name, and yet another, like a black magician with a hatful of malign tricks, and you're knocked on your ass again.

It was too much to face all at once, this outpouring of inexplicable violence, somehow directly aimed at the six people here—or so George's photograph seemed to suggest.

“Both of John Feury's legs were gone,” Mike continued softly, “but the medical examiner says that happened after he died. His heart gave out. He seems to have quite literally died of fear. He was found by the postman, who saw a hand sticking out from under the porch—”

“It was 29, wasn't it?” Rich said, and Bill looked at him quickly. Rich glanced back at him, nodded slightly, and then looked at Mike again. “Twenty-nine Neibolt Street.”

“Oh yes,” Mike said in that same calm voice. “It was number 29.” He drank more water. “Are you really all right, Eddie?”

Eddie nodded. His breathing had eased.

“Rademacher made an arrest the day after Feury's body was discovered,” Mike said. “There was a front-page editorial in the
News
that same day, calling for his resignation, incidentally.”

“After eight murders?” Ben said. “Pretty radical of them, wouldn't you say?”

Beverly wanted to know who had been arrested.

“A guy who lives in a little shack way out on Route 7, almost over the town line and into Newport,” Mike said. “Kind of a hermit. Burns scrapwood in his stove, roofed the place with scavenged shingles and hubcaps. Name of Harold Earl. Probably doesn't see two hundred dollars in cash money over the course of a year. Someone driving by saw him standing out in his dooryard, just looking up at the sky, on the day John Feury's body was discovered. His clothes were covered with blood.”

“Then maybe—” Rich began hopefully.

“He had three butchered deer in his shed,” Mike said. “He'd been jacking over in Haven. The blood on his clothes was deer-blood. Rademacher asked him if he killed John Feury, and Earl is supposed to have said, ‘Oh ayuh, I killed a lot of people. I shot most of them in the war.' He also said he'd seen things in the woods at night. Blue lights sometimes, floating just a few inches off the ground. Corpse-lights, he called them. And Bigfoot.

“They sent him up to the Bangor Mental Health. According to the medical report, his liver's almost entirely gone. He's been drinking paint-thinner—”

“Oh my God,” Beverly said.

“—and is prone to hallucinations. They've been holding on to him, and until three days ago Rademacher was sticking to his idea that Earl was the most likely suspect. He had eight guys out there, digging around his shack and looking for the missing heads, lampshades made out of human skin, God knows what.”

Mike paused, head lowered, and then went on. His voice was
slightly hoarse now. “I'd held off and held off. But when I saw this last one, I made the calls. I wish to God I'd made them sooner.”

“Let's see,” Ben said abruptly.

“The victim was another fifthgrader,” Mike said. “A classmate of the Feury boy. He was found just off Kansas Street, near where Bill used to hide his bike when we were in the Barrens. His name was Jerry Bellwood. He was torn apart. What . . . what was left of him was found at the foot of a cement retaining wall that was put in along most of Kansas Street about twenty years ago to stop the soil erosion. This police photograph of the section of that wall where Bellwood was found was taken less than half an hour after the body was removed. Here.”

He passed the picture to Rich Tozier, who looked and passed it on to Beverly. She glanced at it briefly, winced, and passed it on to Eddie, who gazed at it long and raptly before handing it on to Ben. Ben passed it to Bill with barely a glance.

Printing straggled its way across the concrete retaining wall. It said:

Bill looked up at Mike grimly. He had been bewildered and frightened; now he felt the first stirrings of anger. He was glad. Angry was not such a great way to feel, but it was better than the shock, better than the miserable fear. “Is that written in what I think it's written in?”

“Yes,” Mike said. “Jerry Bellwood's blood.”

Mike had taken his photographs back. He had an idea that Bill might ask for the one of George's last school picture, but Bill did not. He put them in his inside jacket pocket, and when they were out of sight, all of them—Mike included—felt a sense of relief.

“Nine children,” Beverly was saying softly. “I can't believe it. I mean . . . I can believe it, but I can't
believe
it. Nine kids and nothing? Nothing at
all?”

“It's not quite like that,” Mike said. “People are angry, people are scared . . . or so it seems. It's really impossible to tell which ones really feel that way and which ones are faking.”

“Faking?”

“Beverly, do you remember, when we were kids, the man who just folded his newspaper and went inside his house while you were screaming at him for help?”

For a moment something seemed to jump in her eyes and she looked both terrified and aware. Then she only looked puzzled. “No . . . when was that, Mike?”

“Never mind. It will come to you in time. All I can say now is that everything looks the way it should in Derry. Faced with such a grisly string of murders, people are doing all the things you'd expect them to do, and most of them are the same things that went on while kids were disappearing and getting murdered back in '58. The Save Our Children Committee is meeting again, only this time at Derry Elementary School instead of Derry High. There are sixteen detectives from the State Attorney General's office in town, and a contingent of FBI agents as well—I don't know how many, and although Rademacher talks big, I don't think he does, either. The curfew's back in effect—”

“Oh yes. The curfew.” Ben was rubbing the side of his neck slowly and deliberately. “That did wonders back in '58. I remember that much.”

“—and there are Mothers' Walker Groups to make sure that every child who goes to school, grades K through eight, is chaperoned home. The
News
has gotten over two thousand letters demanding a solution in the last three weeks alone. And, of course, the out-migration has begun again. I sometimes think that's the only way to
really
tell who's sincere about wanting it stopped and who isn't. The really sincere ones get scared and leave.”

“People really are leaving?” Richie asked.

“It happens each time the cycle cranks up again. It's impossible to tell just how many go, because the cycle hasn't fallen squarely in
a census year since 1850 or so. But it's a fairish number. They run like kids who just found out the house was haunted for real after all.”

“Come home, come home, come home,” Beverly said softly. When she looked up from her hands it was Bill she looked at, not Mike. “It
wanted
us to come back. Why?”

“It
may
want us all back,” Mike said a little cryptically. “Sure. It
may.
It may want revenge. After all, we balked It once before.”

“Revenge . . . or just to set things back in order,” Bill said.

Mike nodded. “Things are out of order with your own lives, too, you know. None of you left Derry untouched . . . without Its mark on you. All of you forgot what happened here, and your memories of that summer are still only fragmentary. And then there's the passingly curious fact that you're all rich.”

“Oh, come on now!” Richie said. “That's hardly—”

“Be soft, be soft,” Mike said, holding his hand up and smiling faintly. “I'm not accusing you of anything, just trying to get the facts out on the table. You are rich by the standards of a small-town librarian who makes just under eleven grand a year after taxes, okay?”

Rich shrugged the shoulders of his expensive suit uncomfortably. Ben appeared deeply absorbed in tearing small strips from the edge of his napkin. No one was looking directly at Mike except Bill.

“None of you are in the H. L. Hunt class, certainly,” Mike said, “but you are all well-to-do even by the standards of the American upper-middle class. We're all friends here, so fess up: if there's one of you who declared less than ninety thousand dollars on his or her 1984 tax return, raise your hand.”

They glanced around at each other almost furtively, embarrassed, as Americans always seem to be, by the raw fact of their own success—as if cash were hardcooked eggs and affluence the farts that inevitably follow an overdose of same. Bill felt hot blood in his cheeks and was helpless to stop its rise. He had been paid ten thousand more than the sum Mike had mentioned just for doing the first draft of the
Attic Room
screenplay. He had been promised an additional twenty thousand dollars each for two rewrites, if needed. Then there were royalties . . . and the hefty advance on a two-book contract just signed . . . how much
had
he declared on his '84 tax return? Just about eight hundred thousand dollars, right? Enough, anyway, to
seem almost monstrous in light of Mike Hanlon's stated income of just under eleven thousand a year.

So that's how much they pay you to keep the lighthouse, Mike old kid,
Bill thought.
Jesus Christ, somewhere along the line you should have asked for a raise!

Mike said: “Bill Denbrough, a successful novelist in a society where there are only a few novelists and fewer still lucky enough to be making a living from the craft. Beverly Rogan, who's in the rag trade, a field to which more are called but even fewer chosen. She is, in fact, the most sought-after designer in the middle third of the country right now.”

“Oh, it's not
me,”
Beverly said. She uttered a nervous little laugh and lit a fresh cigarette from the smoldering stub of the old one. “It's Tom. Tom's the one. Without him I'd still be relining skirts and sewing up hems. I don't have any business sense at all, even Tom says so. It's just . . . you know, Tom. And luck.” She took a single deep drag from her cigarette and then snuffed it.

“Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” Richie said slyly.

She turned quickly in her seat and gave him a hard look, her color high. “Just what's that supposed to mean, Richie Tozier?”

“Doan hits me, Miz Scawlett!” Richie cried in a high, trembling Pickaninny Voice—and in that moment Bill could see with an eerie clarity the boy he had known; he was not just a superseded presence lurking under Rich Tozier's grownup exterior but a creature almost more real than the man himself. “Doan hits me! Lemme bring you anothuh mint joolip, Miz Scawlett! Youse goan drink hit out on de po'ch where it's be a little bit cooluh! Doan whup disyere boy!”

“You're impossible, Richie,” Beverly said coldly. “You ought to grow up.”

Richie looked at her, his grin fading slowly into uncertainty. “Until I came back here,” he said, “I thought I had.”

“Rich, you may just be the most successful disc jockey in the United States,” Mike said. “You've certainly got L.A. in the palm of your hand. On top of that there are two syndicated programs, one of them a straight top-forty countdown show, the other one something called
The Freaky Forty—”

“You better watch out, fool,” Richie said in a gruff Mr. T Voice,
but he was blushing. “I'll make your front and back change places. I'll give you brain-surgery with my fist. I'll—”