It (87 page)

Not he,
Ben thought.
It. I am standing here in the middle of the Derry Public Library's rotunda on a late-spring afternoon in 1985, I am a grown man, and I am face to face with my childhood's greatest nightmare. I am face to face with It.

“Come on up, Ben,” Pennywise called down. “I won't hurt you. I've got a book for you! A book . . . and a balloon! Come on up!”

Ben opened his mouth to call back.
You're insane if you think I'm going up there,
and suddenly realized that if he did that, everyone here would be looking at him, everyone here would be thinking,
Who is that crazy man?

“Oh, I know you can't answer,” Pennywise called down, and giggled. “Almost fooled you there for a minute, though, didn't I? ‘Pardon me, sir, do you have Prince Albert in a can? . . . You do? . . . Better let the poor guy out!' ‘Pardon me, ma'am, is your refrigerator running? . . . It is?. . . . Then hadn't you better go catch it?' ”

The clown on the landing threw its head back and shrieked laughter. It roared and echoed in the dome of the rotunda like a flight of black bats, and Ben was only able to keep from clapping his hands over his ears with a tremendous effort of will.

“Come on up, Ben,” Pennywise called down. “We'll talk. Neutral ground. What do you say?”

I'm not coming up there,
Ben thought.
When I finally come to you, you won't want to see me, I think. We're going to kill you.

The clown shrieked laughter again. “Kill me?
Kill
me?” And suddenly, horribly, the voice was Richie Tozier's voice, not
his
voice, precisely, but Richie Tozier doing his Pickaninny Voice: “Doan kill me, massa, I be a good nigguh, doan kill thisyere black boy, Haystack!” Then that shrieking laughter again.

Trembling, white-faced, Ben walked across the echoing center of the adults' library. He felt that soon he would vomit. He stood in front of a shelf of books and took one down at random with a hand that trembled badly. His cold fingers flittered the pages.

“This is your one chance, Haystack!” the voice called from behind and above him. “Get out of town. Get out before it gets dark tonight. I'll be after you tonight . . . you and the others. You're too old to stop me, Ben. You're
all
too old. Too old to do anything but get yourselves killed. Get out, Ben. Do you want to see this tonight?”

He turned slowly, still holding the book in his icy hands. He didn't want to look, but it was as if there were an invisible hand under his chin, tilting his head up and up and up.

The clown was gone. Dracula was standing at the top of the lefthand stairway, but it was no movie Dracula; it was not Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee or Frank Langella or Francis Lederer or Reggie Nalder. An ancient man-thing with a face like a twisted root stood there. Its face was deadly pale, its eyes purplish-red, the color of bloodclots. Its mouth dropped open, revealing a mouthful of Gillette Blue-Blades that had been set in the gums at angles; it was like looking into a deadly mirror-maze where a single misstep could get you cut in half.

“
KEEE-RUNCH
!” it screamed, and its jaws snapped closed. Blood gouted from its mouth in a red-black flood. Chunks of its severed lips fell to the glowing white silk of its formal shirt and slid down its front, leaving snail-trails of blood behind.

“What did Stan Uris see before he died?”
the vampire on the landing screamed down at him, laughing through the bloody hole of its mouth.
“Was it Prince Albert in a can? Was it Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier? What did he see, Ben? Do you want to see it too? What did he see? What did he see?”
Then that shrieking laughter again, and
Ben knew that he would scream now himself, yes, there was no way to stop the scream, it was going to come. Blood was pattering down from the landing in a grisly shower. One drop had landed on the arthritis-bunched hand of an old man who was reading
The Wall Street Journal.
It was running down between his knuckles, unseen and unfelt.

Ben hitched in breath, sure the scream would follow, unthinkable in the quiet of this softly drizzling spring afternoon, as shocking as the slash of a knife . . . or a mouthful of razor-blades.

Instead, what came out in a shaky, uneven rush, spoken instead of screamed, spoken low like a prayer, were these words: “We made slugs out of it, of course. We made the silver dollar into silver slugs.”

The gentleman in the driving-cap who had been perusing the de Vargas sketches looked up sharply. “Nonsense,” he said. Now people
did
look up; someone hissed “Shhh!” at the old man in an annoyed voice.

“I'm sorry,” Ben said in a low, trembling voice. He was faintly aware that his face was now running with sweat, and that his shirt was plastered to his body. “I was thinking aloud—”

“Nonsense,” the old gentleman repeated, in a louder voice. “Can't make silver bullets from silver dollars. Common misconception. Pulp fiction. Problem is with specific gravity—”

Suddenly the woman, Ms. Danner, was there. “Mr. Brockhill, you'll have to be quiet,” she said kindly enough. “People are reading—”

“Man's sick,” Brockhill said abruptly, and went back to his book. “Give him an aspirin, Carole.”

Carole Danner looked at Ben and her face sharpened with concern.
“Are
you ill, Mr. Hanscom? I know it's terribly impolite to say so, but you look terrible.”

Ben said, “I . . . I had Chinese food for lunch. I don't think it's agreed with me.”

“If you want to lie down, there's a cot in Mr. Hanlon's office. You could—”

“No. Thanks, but no.” What he wanted was not to lie down but to get the hell out of the Derry Public Library. He looked up at the landing. The clown was gone. The vampire was gone. But tied to
the low wrought-iron railing which surrounded the landing was a balloon. Written on its bulging skin were the words:
HAVE A GOOD DAY! TONIGHT YOU DIE
!

“I've got your library card,” she said, putting a tentative hand on his arm. “Do you still want it?”

“Yes, thanks,” Ben said. He drew a deep, shuddery breath. “I'm very sorry about this.”

“I just hope it isn't food-poisoning,” she said.

“Wouldn't work,” Mr. Brockhill said without looking up from de Vargas or removing his dead pipe from the corner of his mouth. “Device of pulp fiction. Bullet would tumble.”

And speaking again with no foreknowledge that he was going to speak, Ben said:
” Slugs,
not bullets. We realized almost right away that we couldn't make bullets. I mean, we were just kids. It was my idea to—”

“Shhhh!”
someone said again.

Brockhill gave Ben a slightly startled look, seemed about to speak, then went back to the sketches.

At the desk, Carole Danner handed him a small orange card with
DERRY PUBLIC LIBRARY
stamped across the top. Bemused, Ben realized it was the first adult library-card he had owned in his whole life. The one he'd had as a kid had been canary-yellow.

“Are you sure you don't want to lie down, Mr. Hanscom?”

“I'm feeling a little better, thanks.”

“Sure?”

He managed a smile. “I'm sure.”

“You do look a little better,” she said, but she said it doubtfully, as if understanding that this was the proper thing to say but not really believing it.

Then she was holding a book under the microfilm gadget they used these days to record book-loans, and Ben felt a touch of almost hysterical amusement.
It's the book I grabbed off the shelf when the clown started to do its Pickaninny Voice,
he thought.
She thought I wanted to borrow it. I've made my first withdrawal from the Derry Public Library in twenty-five years, and I don't even know what the book is. Furthermore, I don't care. Just let me out of here, okay? That'll be enough.

“Thank you,” he said, putting the book under his arm.

“You're more than welcome, Mr. Hanscom. Are you sure you wouldn't like an aspirin?”

“Quite sure,” he said—and then hesitated. “You wouldn't by any chance know what happened to Mrs. Starrett, would you? Barbara Starrett? She used to be the head of the Children's Library.”

“She died,” Carole Danner said. “Three years ago. It was a stroke, I understand. It was a great shame. She was relatively young . . . fifty-eight or -nine, I think. Mr. Hanlon closed the library for the day.”

“Oh,” Ben said, and felt a hollow place open in his heart. That's what happened when you got back to your used-to-be, as the song put it. The frosting on the cake was sweet, but the stuff underneath was bitter. People forgot you, or died on you, or lost their hair and teeth. In some cases you found that they had lost their minds. Oh it was great to be alive. Boy howdy.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “You liked her, didn't you?”

“All the kids liked Mrs. Starrett,” Ben said, and was alarmed to realize that tears were now very close.

“Are you—”

If she asks me if I'm all right one more time, I really am going to cry, I think. Or scream. Or something.

He glanced at his watch and said, “I really have to run. Thanks for being so nice.”

“Have a nice day, Mr. Hanscom.”

Sure. Because tonight I die.

He tipped a finger her way and started back across the floor. Mr. Brockhill glanced up at him once, sharply and suspiciously.

He looked up at the landing which topped the lefthand staircase. The balloon still floated there, tied by its string to lacy wrought-iron. But now the printing on its side read:

I KILLED BARBARA STARRETT!

—PENNYWISE THE CLOWN

He looked away, feeling the pulse in his throat starting to run again. He let himself out and was startled by sunlight—the clouds overhead were coming unravelled and a warm late-May sun was shafting down, making the grass look impossibly green and lush.
Ben felt something start to lift from his heart. It seemed to him that he had left some insupportable burden behind in the library . . . and then he looked down at the book he had inadvertently withdrawn and his teeth clamped together with sudden, painful force. It was
Bulldozer,
by Stephen W. Meader, one of the books he had withdrawn from the library on the day he had dived into the Barrens to get away from Henry Bowers and his friends.

And speaking of Henry, the track of his engineer boot was still on the book's cover.

Shaking, fumbling at the pages, he turned to the back. The library had gone over to a microfilm checkout system; he had
seen
that. But there was still a pocket in the back of this book with a card tucked into it. There was a name written on each line of the card followed by the librarian's return-date stamp. Looking at the card, Ben saw this:

And, on the last line of the card, his own childish signature, written in heavy pencil-strokes:

Stamped across this card, stamped across the book's flyleaf, stamped across the thickness of the pages, stamped again and again in smeary red ink that looked like blood, was one word:
CANCEL
.

“Oh dear God,” Ben murmured. He did not know what else to say; that seemed to cover the entire situation. “Oh dear God, dear God.”

He stood in the new sunlight, suddenly wondering what was happening to the others.

Eddie got off the bus at the corner of Kansas Street and Kossuth Lane. Kossuth was a street that ran a quarter of a mile downhill before dead-ending abruptly where the crumbling earth sloped into the Barrens. He had absolutely no idea why he had chosen this place to leave the bus; Kossuth Lane meant nothing to him, and he had known no one on this particular section of Kansas Street. But it seemed like the right place. That was all he knew, but at this point it seemed to be enough. Beverly had climbed off the bus with a little wave at one of the Lower Main Street stops. Mike had taken his car back to the library.

Now, watching the small and somehow absurd Mercedes bus pull away, he wondered exactly what he was doing here, standing on an obscure street-corner in an obscure town nearly five hundred miles away from Myra, who was undoubtedly worried to tears about him. He felt an instant of almost painful vertigo, touched his jacket pocket, and remembered that he had left his Dramamine back at the Town House along with the rest of his pharmacopeia. He had aspirin, though. He would no more have gone out
sans
aspirin than he would have gone out
sans
pants. He chugged a couple dry and began to walk along Kansas Street, thinking vaguely that he might go to the Public Library or perhaps cross over to Costello Avenue. It was beginning to clear now, and he supposed he could even walk across to West Broadway and admire the old Victorian houses that stood there along the only two really handsome residential blocks in Derry. He used to do that sometimes when he was a kid—just walk along West Broadway, sort of casual, like he was on his way to somewhere else. There was the Muellers', near the corner of Witcham and West Broadway, a red house with turrets on either side and hedges in front. The Muellers had a gardener who always looked at Eddie with suspicious eyes until he had passed on his way.