felt someone put an arm around his shoulders. The feeling was warm and comforting and deeply familiar.
Bill felt the sense of power that he remembered from before, but understood with some desperation that things really had changed. The power was nowhere near as strong-it struggled and flickered like a candle-flame in foul air. The darkness seemed thicker and closer to them, more triumphant. And he could smell It. Down this passageway, he thought, and not so terribly far, is a door with a mark on it. What was behind that door? It’s the one thing I still can’t remember. I can remember making my fingers stiff, because they wanted to tremble, and I can remember pushing the door open. I can even remember the flood of light that streamed out and how it seemed almost alive, as if it wasn’t just light but fluorescent snakes. I remember the smell, like the monkey-house in a big zoo, but even worse. And then… nothing.
“Do a-a-any of y-y-y-you rem-m-member what It really w-w-was?”
“No,” Eddie said.
“I think… ” Richie began, and then Bill could almost feel him shake his head in the dark. “No.”
“No,” Beverly said.
“Huh-uh.” That was Ben. “That’s the one thing I still can’t remember. What It was… or how we fought It.”
“Chud,” Beverly said. That’s how we fought it. But I don’t remember what that means.”
“Stand by m-me,” Bill said, “and I-I’ll stuh-stuh-hand by y-y-you guys.”
“Bill,” Ben said. His voice was very calm. “something is coming.”
Bill listened. He heard dragging, shambling footsteps approaching them in the dark… and he was afraid.
“A-A-Audra?” he called… and knew already that it was not her.
Whatever was shambling toward them drew closer.
Bill struck a light.
8
DERRY / 5:00 A.M.
The first wrong thing happened on that late-spring day in 1985 two minutes before official sunrise. To understand how wrong it was one would have to have known two facts that were known to Mike Hanlon (who lay unconscious in the Derry Home Hospital as the sun came up), both concerning the Grace Baptist Church, which had stood on the corner of Witcham and Jackson since 1897. The church was topped with a slender white spire which was the apotheosis of every Protestant church-steeple in New England. There were clock-faces on all four sides of the steeple-base, and the clock itself had been constructed and shipped from Switzerland in the year 1898. The only one like it stood in the town square of Haven Village, forty miles away.
Stephen Bowie, a timber baron who lived on West Broadway, donated the clock to the town at a cost of some $17,000. Bowie could afford it. He was a devout churchgoer and deacon for forty years (during several of those later years he was also president of Derry’s Legion of White Decency chapter). In addition, he was known for his devout layman sermons on Mother’s Day, which he always referred to reverently as Mother’s Sunday.
From the time of its installation until May 31st, 1985, that clock had faithfully chimed each hour and each half-with one notable exception. On the day of the explosion at the Kitchener Ironworks it had not chimed the noon-hour. Residents believed that the Reverend Jollyn had silenced the clock to show that the church was in mourning for the dead children, and Jollyn never disabused them of this notion, although it was not true. The clock had simply not chimed.
Nor did it chime the hour of five on the morning of May 31st, 1985.
At that moment, all over Derry, old-timers opened their eyes and sat up, disturbed for no reason they could put their fingers on. Medicines were gulped, false teeth put in, pipes and cigars lit.
The old folks stood a watch.
One of them was Norbert Keene, now in his nineties. He hobbled to the window and looked out at a darkening sky. The weather report the night before had called for clear skies, but his bones told him it was going to rain, and hard. He felt scared, deep inside him; in some obscure way he felt threatened, as if a poison were working its way relentlessly toward his heart. He thought randomly of the day the Bradley Gang had ridden heedlessly into Derry, into the sights of seventy-five pistols and rifles. That kind of work left a man feeling kind of warm and lazy inside, like everything was… was somehow confirmed. He couldn’t put it any better than that, even to himself. Work like that left a man feeling like he maybe might live forever, and Norbert Keene damn near had. Ninety-six years old come June 24th, and he still walked three miles every day. But now he felt scared.
“Those kids,” he said, looking out his window, unaware he had spoken. “What is it with them damn kids? What they monkeying around with this time?”
Egbert Thoroughgood, ninety-nine, who had been in the Silver Dollar when Claude Heroux tuned up his axe and played “The Dead March” for four men on it, awoke at the same moment, sat up, and let out a rusty scream that no one heard. He had dreamed of Claude, only Claude had been coming after him, and the axe had come down, and a moment after it did Thoroughgood had seen his own severed hand twitching and curling on the counter.
Something wrong, he thought in his muddy way, frightened and shaking all over in his pee-stained longjohns. Something dreadful wrong.
Dave Gardener, who had discovered George Denbrough’s mutilated body in October of 1957 and whose son had discovered the first victim of this new cycle earlier in the spring, opened his eyes on the stroke of five and thought, even before looking at the clock on the bureau: Grace Church clock didn’t chime the hour… What’s wrong? He felt a large ill-defined fright. Dave had prospered over the years; in 1965 he had purchased The Shoeboat, and now there was a second Shoeboat at the Derry Mall and a third up in Bangor. Suddenly all of those things-things he had spent his life working for-seemed in jeopardy. From what? he cried to himself, looking at his sleeping wife. From what, why you so goddam antsy just because that clock didn’t chime? But there was no answer.
He got up and went to the window, hitching at the waistband of his pyjamas. The sky was restless with clouds racing in from the west, and Dave’s disquiet grew. For the first time in a very long while he found himself thinking of the screams that had brought him to his porch twenty-seven years ago, to see that writhing figure in the yellow rainslicker. He looked at the approaching clouds and thought: We’re in danger. All of its. Derry.
Chief Andrew Rademacher, who really believed he had tried his best to solve the new string of child-murders that had plagued Derry, stood on the porch of his house, thumbs in his Sam Browne belt, looking up at the clouds, and felt the same disquiet. Something getting ready to happen. Looks like it’s going to pour buckets, for one thing. But that’s not all. He shuddered… and as he stood there on his porch, the smell of the bacon his wife was cooking wafting out through the screen door, the first dime-sized drops of rain darkened the sidewalk in front of his pleasant Reynolds Street home and, somewhere just over the horizon from Bassey Park, thunder rumbled.
Rademacher shivered again.
9
GEORGE / 5:01 A.M.
Bill held the match up… and uttered a long trembling despairing screech.
It was George wavering up the tunnel toward him, George, still dressed in his blood-spattered yellow rainslicker. One sleeve dangled limp and useless. George’s face was white as cheese and his eyes were shiny silver. They fixed on Bill’s own.
“My boat!” Georgie’s lost voice rose, wavering, in the tunnel. “I can’t find it, Bill, I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t find it and now I’m dead and it’s your fault your fault YOUR FAULT-”
“Juh-Juh-Georgie!” Bill shrieked. He felt his mind tottering, ripping free of its moorings.
George stumble-staggered toward him and now his one remaining arm rose toward Bill, the white hand at the end of it hooked into a claw. The nails were dirty and grasping.
“Your fault,” George whispered, and grinned. His teeth were fangs; they opened and closed slowly, like the teeth in a beartrap. “You sent me out and it’s all… your… fault.”
“Nuh-Nuh-No, Juh Juh-Georgie!” Bill cried. “I dih-dih-didn’t nuh-hun-nuh-know-”
“Kill you!” George cried, and a mixture of doglike sounds came out of that fanged mouth: yips, yelps, howls. A kind of laughter. Bill could smell him now, could smell George rotting. It was a cellar-smell, squirmy, the smell of some final monster standing slumped and yellow-eyed in the corner, waiting to unzip some small boy’s guts.
George’s teeth gnashed together. The sound was like billiard balls clicking off one another. Yellow pus began to leak from his eyes and dribble down his face… and the match went out.
Bill felt his friends disappear-they were running, of course they were, they were leaving him alone. They were cutting him off, as his parents had cut him off because George was right: it was all his fault. Soon he would feel that single hand seize his throat, soon he would feel those fangs pulling him open, and that would be right. That would be only just. He had sent George out to die and he had spent his whole adult life writing about the horror of that betrayal-oh, he had put many faces on it, almost as many faces as It had put on for their benefit, but the monster at the bottom of everything was only George, running out into the receding flood with his paraffin-coated paper boat. Now would come the atonement.
“You deserve to die for killing me,” George whispered. He was very close now. Bill closed his eyes.
Then yellow light splashed the tunnel and he opened them. Richie was holding up a match. “Fight It, Bill!” Richie shouted. “God’s sake! Fight It!”
What are you doing here? He looked at them, bewildered. They hadn’t run after all. How could that be? How could that be after they had seen how foully he had murdered his own brother?
“Fight It!” Beverly was screaming. “Oh Bill, fight It! Only you can do this one! Please-”
George was less than five feet away now. He suddenly stuck his tongue out at Bill. It was crawling with white fungoid growths. Bill screamed again.
“Kill It, Bill!” Eddie shouted. “That’s not your brother! Kill It while it’s small! Kill It NOW!”
George glanced at Eddie, cutting his shiny-silver eyes that way for just a moment, and Eddie reeled back and struck the wall as if he had been pushed. Bill stood mesmerized, watching his brother come toward him, George again after all these years, it was George at the end as it had been George at the beginning, oh yes, and he could hear the creak of George’s yellow slicker as George closed the distance, he could hear the jingle of the buckles on his overshoes and he could smell something like wet leaves, as if underneath the slicker George’s body was made of them, as if the feet inside George’s galoshes were leaf-feet, yes, a leaf-man, that was it, that was George, he was a rotted balloon face and a body made of dead leaves, the kind that sometimes choke the sewers after a flood.
Dimly he heard Beverly shriek.
(he thrusts his fists)
“Bill, please Bill-”
(against the posts and still insists)
“We’ll look for my boat together,” George said. Thick yellow pus, mock tears, rolled down his cheeks. He reached for Bill and his head cocked sideward, his teeth peeling back from those fangs.
(he sees the ghosts he sees the ghosts HE SEES)
“We’ll find it,” George said and Bill could smell Its breath and it was a smell like exploded animals lying on the highway at midnight. As George’s mouth yawned, he could see things squirming
