It

strings. There was a forest of white strings hanging down. They looked like white strands of spiderweb. The clown took Ade under there. I could see its suit brushing through those strings. Ade was making awful choking sounds. I started after him… and the clown looked back. I saw its eyes, and all at once I understood who it was.”

“Who was it, Don?” Harold Gardener asked softly.

“It was Derry,” Don Hagarty said. “It was this town.”

“And what did you do then?” It was Reeves.

“I ran, you dumb shit,” Hagarty said, and burst into tears.

17

Harold Gardener kept his peace until November 13th, the day before John Garton and Steven Dubay were to go on trial in Derry District Court for the murder of Adrian Mellon. Then he went to see Tom Boutillier. He wanted to talk about the clown. Boutillier didn’t-but when he saw Gardener might do something stupid without a little guidance, he did.

There was no clown, Harold. The only clowns out that night were those three kids. You know that as well as I do.”

“We have two witnesses-”

“Oh, that’s crap. Unwin decided to bring on the One-Armed Man, as in “We didn’t kill the poor little faggot, it was the one-armed man,” as soon as he understood he’d really gotten his buns into some hot water this time. Hagarty was hysterical. He stood by and watched those kids murder his best friend. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d seen flying saucers.”

But Boutillier knew better. Gardener could see it in his eyes, and the Assistant DA’s ducking and dodging irritated him.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re talking about independent witnesses here. Don’t bullshit me.”

“Oh, you want to talk bullshit? Are you telling me you believe there was a vampire clown under the Main Street Bridge? Because that’s my idea of bullshit.”

“No, not exactly, but-”

“Or that Hagarty saw a billion balloons under there, each imprinted with exactly the same thing as what was written on his lover’s hat? Because that is also my idea of bullshit.”

“No, but-”

“Then why are you bothering with this?”

“Stop cross-examining me!” Gardener roared. “They both described it the same and neither knew what the other one was saying!”

Boutillier had been sitting at his desk, playing with a pencil. Now he put the pencil down, got up, and walked over to Harold Gardener. Boutillier was five inches shorter, but Gardener retreated a step before the man’s anger.

“Do you want us to lose this case, Harold?”

“No. Of course n-”

“Do you want those running sores to walk free?”

“No!”

“Okay. Good. Since we both agree on the basics, I’ll tell you exactly what I think. Yes, there was probably a man under the bridge that night. Maybe he was even wearing a clown suit, although I’ve dealt with enough witnesses to guess maybe it was just a stewbum or a transient wearing a bunch of cast-off clothes. I think he was probably down there scrounging for dropped change or roadmeat-half a burger someone chucked over the side, or maybe the crumbs from the bottom of a Frito bag. Their eyes did the rest, Harold. Now is that possible?”

“I don’t know,” Harold said. He wanted to be convinced, but given the exact tally of the two descriptions… no. He didn’t think it was possible.

“Here’s the bottom line. I don’t care if it was Kinko the Klown or a guy in an Uncle Sam suit on stilts or Hubert the Happy Homo. If we introduce this fellow into the case, their lawyer is going to be on it before you can say “Jack Robinson'. He’s going to say those two little innocent lambs out there with their fresh haircuts and new suits didn’t do anything but toss that gay fellow Mellon over the side of the bridge for a joke. He’ll point out that Mellon was still alive after he took the fall; they have Hagarty’s testimony as well as Unwin’s for that.

“His clients didn’t commit murder, oh no! It was a psycho in a clown suit. If we introduce this, that’s going to happen and you know it.”

“Unwin’s going to tell that story anyhow.”

“But Hagarty isn’t,” Boutillier said. “Because he understands. Without Hagarty, who’s going to believe Unwin?”

“Well, there’s us,” Harold Gardener said with a bitterness that surprised even himself, “but I guess we’re not telling.”

“Oh, give me a break!” Boutillier roared, throwing up his hands. “They killed him! They didn’t just throw him over the side-Garton had a switchblade. Mellon was stabbed seven times, including once in the left lung and twice in the testicles. The wounds match the blade. Four of his ribs were broken-Dubay did that, bear-hugging him. He was bitten, all right. There were bites on his arms, his left cheek, his neck. I think that was Unwin and Garton, although we’ve only got one clear match, and that one’s probably not clear enough to stand up in court. And so all right, there was a big chunk of meat gone from his right armpit, so what? One of them really liked to bite. Probably even got himself a pretty good bone-on while he was doing it. I’m betting Garton, although we’ll never prove it. And Mellon’s earlobe was gone.”

Boutillier stopped, glaring at Harold.

“If we let in this clown story we’ll never bring it home to them. Do you want that?”

“No, I told you.”

“The guy was a fruit, but he wasn’t hurting anyone,” Boutillier said. “so hi-ho-the-dairy-o, along come these three pusholes in their engineer boots and they steal his life. I’m going to put them in the slam, my friend, and if I hear they got their puckery little assholes cored down there at Thomaston, I’m gonna send them cards saying I hope whoever did it had AIDS.”

Very fiery, Gardener thought. And the convictions will also look very good on your record when you run for the top spot in two years.

But he left without saying more, because he also wanted to see them put away.

18

John Webber Garton was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to ten to twenty years in Thomaston State Prison.

Steven Bishoff Dubay was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to fifteen years in Shawshank State Prison.

Christopher Philip Unwin was tried separately as a juvenile and convicted of second-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced to six months at the South Windham Boys” Training Facility, sentence suspended.

At the time of this writing, all three sentences are under appeal; Garton and Dubay may be seen on any given day girl-watching or playing Penny Pitch in Bassey Park, not far from where Mellon’s torn body was found floating against one of the pilings of the Main Street Bridge.

Don Hagarty and Chris Unwin have left town.

At the major trial-that of Garton and Dubay-no one mentioned a clown.

Chapter 3 SIX PHONE CALLS (1985)

1 STANLEY URIS TAKES A BATH

Patricia Uris later told her mother she should have known something was wrong. She should have known it, she said, because Stanley never took baths in the early evening. He showered early each morning and sometimes soaked late at night (with a magazine in one hand and a cold beer in the other), but baths at 7:00 P.M. were not his style.

And then there was the thing about the books. It should have delighted him; instead, in some obscure way she did not understand, it seemed to have upset and depressed him. About three months before that terrible night, Stanley had discovered that a childhood friend of his had turned out to be a writer-not a real writer, Patricia told her mother, but a novelist. The name on the books was William Denbrough, but Stanley had sometimes called him Stuttering Bill. He had worked his way through almost all of the man’s books; had, in fact, been reading the last on the night of the bath-the night of May 28th, 1985. Patty herself had picked up one of the earlier ones, out of curiosity. She had put it down after just three chapters.

It had not just been a novel, she told her mother later; it had been a horrorbook. She said it just that way, all one word, the way she would have said sexbook. Patty was a sweet, kind woman, but not terribly articulate-she had wanted to tell her mother how much that book had frightened her and why it had upset her, but had not been able. “It was full of monsters,” she said. “Full of monsters chasing after little children. There were killings, and… I don’t know… bad feelings and hurt. Stuff like that.” It had, in fact, struck her as almost pornographic; that was the word which kept eluding her, probably because she had never in her life spoken it, although she knew what it meant. But Stan felt as if he’d rediscovered one of his childhood chums… He talked about writing to him, but I knew he wouldn’t… I knew those stories made him feel bad, too… and… and…”

And then Patty Uris began to cry.

That night, lacking roughly six months of being twenty-eight years from the day in 1957 when George Denbrough had met Pennywise the Clown, Stanley and Patty had been sitting in the den of their home in a suburb of Atlanta. The TV was on. Patty was sitting in the love-seat in front of it, dividing her attention between a pile of sewing and her favorite game-show, Family Feud. She simply adored Richard Dawson and thought the watch-chain he always wore was terribly sexy, although wild horses would not have drawn this admission out of her. She also liked the show because she almost always got the most popular answers (there were no right answers on Family Feud, exactly; only the most popular ones). She had once asked Stan why the questions that seemed so easy to her usually seemed so hard to the families on the show. “It’s probably a lot tougher when you’re up there under those lights,” Stanley had replied, and it seemed to her that a shadow had drifted over his face. “Everything’s a lot tougher when it’s for real. That’s when you choke. When it’s for real.”

That was probably very true, she decided. Stanley had really fine insights into human nature sometimes. Much finer, she considered, than his old friend William Denbrough, who had gotten rich writing a bunch of horrorbooks which appealed to people’s baser natures.