lumbermen’s shirts, tee-shirts, banker’s suits. All of them were holding glasses and bottles victoriously aloft. There were two big signs in the window. WELCOME BACK, JOHN BARLEYCORN! one read. The other said: FREE BEER TONIGHT. The clown, dressed like the biggest dandy you ever saw (white shoes, spats, gangster pants), had his foot on the running board of a Reo auto and was drinking champagne from a lady’s high-heeled shoe.
“1945,” Mike said.
The Derry News again. The headline: JAPAN SURRENDERS-IT’s OVER! THANK GOD IT’s OVER! A parade was snake-dancing its way along Main Street toward Up-Mile Hill. And there was the clown in the background, wearing his silver suit with the orange buttons, frozen in the matrix of dots that made up the grainy newsprint photo, seeming to suggest (at least to Bill) that nothing was over, no one had surrendered, nothing was won, nil was still the rule, zilch still the custom; seeming to suggest above all that all was still lost.
Bill felt cold and dry and scared.
Suddenly the dots in the picture disappeared and it began to move.
“That’s what-” Mike began.
“L-L-Look,” Bill said. The word dropped out of his mouth like a partially melted ice-cube. “A-A-All of you luh-look at th-this!”
They crowded around.
“Oh my God,” Beverly whispered, awed.
“That’s IT!” Richie nearly screamed, pounding Bill on the back in his excitement. He looked around at Eddie’s white, drawn face and Stan Uris’s frozen one. “That’s what we saw in George’s room! That’s exactly what we -
’shhh,” Ben said. “Listen.” And, almost sobbing: “You can hear them-Christ, you can hear them in there.”
And in the silence that was only broken by the mild stir of the summer breeze, they all realized they could. The band was playing a martial marching tune, made faint and tinny by distance… or the passage of time… or whatever it was. The cheering of the crowd was like sounds that might come through on a badly tuned radio station. There were popping noises, also faint, like the muffled sound of snapping fingers.
“Firecrackers,” Beverly whispered, and rubbed at her eyes with hands that shook. “Those are firecrackers, aren’t they?”
No one answered. They watched the picture, their eyes eating up their faces.
The parade wiggled its way toward them, but just before the marchers reached the extreme foreground-at the point where it seemed they must march right out of the picture and into a world thirteen years later-they dropped from sight, as if on some kind of unknowable curve. The World War I soldiers first, their faces strangely old under their pie-plate helmets, with their sign which read THE DERRY VFW WELCOMES HOME OUR BRAVE BOYS, then the Boy Scouts, the Kiwanians, the Home Nursing Corps, the Derry Christian Marching Band, then the Derry World War II vets themselves, with the high-school band behind them. The crowd moved and shifted. Tickertape and confetti fluttered down from the second- and third-floor windows of the business buildings that lined the streets. The clown pranced along the sidelines, doing splits and cartwheels, miming a sniper, miming a salute. And Bill noticed for the first time that people were turning from him-but not as if they saw him, exactly; it was more as if they felt a draft or smelled something bad.
Only the children really saw him, and they shrank away.
Ben stretched his hand out to the picture, as Bill had done in George’s room.
“Nuh-Nuh-Nuh-NO!” Bill cried.
“I think it’s all right, Bill,” Ben said. “Look.” And he laid his hand on the protective plastic over the picture for a moment and then took it back. “But if you stripped off that cover-”
Beverly screamed. The clown had left off its antics when Ben withdrew his hand. It rushed toward them, its paint-bloody mouth gibbering and laughing. Bill winced back but held onto the book all the same, thinking it would drop out of sight as the parade had done, and the marching band, and the Boy Scouts, and the Cadillac convertible carrying Miss Derry of 1945.
But the clown did not disappear along that curve that seemed to define the edge of that old existence. Instead, it leaped with a scary, nimble grace onto a lamppost that stood in the extreme left foreground of the picture. It shinnied up like a monkey on a stick-and suddenly its face was pressed against the tough plastic sheet Will Hanlon had put over each of the pages in his book. Beverly screamed again and this time Eddie joined her, although his scream was faint and blue-breathless. The plastic bulged out-later they would all agree they saw it. Bill saw the bulb of the clown’s red nose flatten, the way your nose will flatten when you press it against a windowpane.
“Kill you all!” The clown was laughing and screaming. “Try to stop me and I’ll kill you all! Drive you crazy and then kill you all! You can’t stop me! I’m the Gingerbread Man! I’m the Teenage Werewolf!”
And for a moment It was the Teenage Werewolf, the moon-silvered face of the lycanthrope peering out at them from over the collar of the silver suit, white teeth bared.
“Can’t stop me, I’m the leper!”
Now the leper’s face, haunted and peeling, rotting with sores, stared at them with the eyes of the living dead.
“Can’t stop me, I’m the mummy!”
The leper’s face aged and ran with sterile cracks. Ancient bandages swam halfway out of its skin and solidified there. Ben turned away, his face as white as curds, one hand plastered over his neck and ear.
“Can’t stop me, I’m the dead boys!”
“No!” Stan Uris screamed. His eyes bulged above braised-looking crescents of skin-shockflesh, Bill thought randomly, and it was a word he would use in a novel twelve years later, with no idea where it had come from, simply taking it, as writers take the right word at the right time, as a simple gift from that outer space
(otherspace)
where the good words come from sometimes.
Stan snatched the album from his hands and slammed it shut. He held it closed with both hands, the tendons standing out along the inner surfaces of his wrists and forearms. He looked around at the others with eyes that were nearly insane. “No,” he said rapidly. “No, no, no.”
And suddenly Bill found he was more concerned with Stan’s repeated denials than with the clown, and he understood that this was exactly the sort of reaction the clown had hoped to provoke, because…
Because maybe It’s scared us… really scared for the first time in Its long, long life.
He grabbed Stan and shook him twice, hard, holding onto his shoulders. Stan’s teeth clicked together and he dropped the album. Mike picked it up and put it aside in a hurry, not liking to touch it after what he had seen. But it was still his father’s, and he understood intuitively that his father would never see in it what he had just seen.
“No,” Stan said softly.
“Yes,” Bill said.
“No,” Stan said again.
“Yes. Wea-a-all-”
“No.”
“-a-a-all suh-haw it, Stan,” Bill said. He looked at the others.
“Yes,” Ben said.
“Yes,” Richie said.
“Yes,” Mike said. “Oh my God, yes.”
“Yes,” Bev said.
“Yes,” Eddie managed, gasping it out of his rapidly closing throat.
Bill looked at Stan, demanding with his eyes that Stan look back at him. “duh-don’t let it g-g-get y-you, man,” Bill said. “Yuh-you suh-saw it, t-t-too.”
“I didn’t want to!” Stan wailed. Sweat stood out on his brow in an oily sheen.
“But y-y-you duh-duh-did.”
Stan looked at the others, one by one. He ran his hands through his short hair and fetched up a great, shuddering sigh. His eyes seemed to clear of that lowering madness that had so disturbed Bill.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Okay. Yes. That what you want? Yes.”
Bill thought: We’re still all together. It didn’t stop us. We can still kill It. We can still kill It… if we’re brave.
Bill looked around at the others and saw in each pair of eyes some measure of Stan’s hysteria. Not quite as bad, but there.
“Y-Y-Yeah,” he said, and smiled at Stan. After a moment Stan smiled back and some of that horrible shocked look left his face. “That’s what I wuh-wuh-wanted, you weh-weh-wet end.”
“Beep-beep, Dumbo,” Stan said, and they all laughed. It was hysterical screaming laughter, but better than no laughter at all, Bill reckoned.
“C-C-Come on,” he said, because someone had to say something. “Let’s f-f-finish the clubhouse. What do you s-s-say?”
He saw the gratitude in their eyes and felt a measure of gladness for them… but their gratitude did little to heal his own horror. In fact, there was something in their gratitude which made him want to hate them. Would he never be able to express his own terror, lest the fragile welds that made them into one thing should let go? And even to think such a thing wasn’t really fair, was it? Because in some measure at least he was using them-using his friends, risking their lives-to settle the score for his dead brother. And was even that the bottom? No, because George was dead, and if revenge could be exacted at all, Bill suspected it could only be exacted on behalf of the living. And what did that make him? A selfish little shit waving a tin sword and trying to make himself look like King Arthur?
Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up.
His resolve was still strong, but it was a bitter resolve.
Bitter.
Chapter 15
THE SMOKE-HOLE
1
Richie Tozier pushes his glasses up on his nose (already the gesture feels perfectly familiar, although he has worn contact lenses for twenty years) and thinks with some amazement that the
