had taken on a kind of glow in Eddie's imagination. Looking at its weedy yard and its slumped porch and the boards nailed across its windows, he would feel an unhealthy fascination take hold of him. And six weeks ago he had parked his bike on the gravelly verge of the street (the sidewalk ended four houses farther back) and walked across the lawn toward the porch of that house.
His heart had been beating hard in his chest, and his mouth had that dry taste again--listening to Bill's story of the dreadful picture, he knew that what he had felt when approaching that house was about the same as what Bill had felt going into George's room. He did not feel as if he was in control of himself. He felt pushed.
It did not seem as if his feet were moving; instead the house itself, brooding and silent, seemed to draw closer to where he stood.
Faintly, he could hear a diesel engine in the trainyard--that and the liquid-metallic slam of couplings being made. They were shunting some cars onto sidings, picking up others. Making a train.
His hand gripped his aspirator, but, oddly, his asthma had not closed down as it had on the day he fled from the hobo with the rotted nose. There was only that sense of standing still and watching the house slide stealthily toward him, as if on a hidden track.
Eddie looked under the porch. There was no one there. It was not really surprising. This was spring, and hobos showed up most frequently in Derry from late September to early November. During those six weeks or so a man could pick up day-work on one of the outlying farms if he looked even half-decent. There were potatoes and apples to pick, snow-fence to string, barn and shed roofs which needed to be patched before December came along, whistling up winter.
No hobos under the porch, but plenty of sign they had been there. Empty beer cans, empty beer bottles, empty liquor bottles. A dirt-crusted blanket lay against the brick foundation like a dead dog. There were drifts of crumpled newspapers and one old shoe and a smell like garbage. There were thick layers of old leaves under there.
Not wanting to do it but unable to help himself, Eddie had crawled under the porch. He could feel his heartbeat slamming in his head now, driving white spots of light across his field of vision.
The smell was worse underneath--booze and sweat and the dark brown perfume of decaying leaves. The old leaves didn't even crackle under his hands and knees. They and the old newspapers only sighed.
I'm a hobo, Eddie thought incoherently. I'm a hobo and I ride the rods. That's what I do. Ain't got no money, ain't got no home, but I got me a bottle and a dollar and a place to sleep. I'll pick apples this week and potatoes the week after that and when the frost locks up the ground like money inside a bank vault, why, I'll hop a GS&WM box that smells of sugar-beets and I'll sit in the corner and pull some hay over me if there is some and I'll drink me a little drink and chew me a little chew and sooner or later I'll get to Portland or Beantown, and if I don't get busted by a railroad security dick I'll hop one of those 'Bama Star boxes and head down south and when I get there I'll pick lemons or limes or oranges. And if I get vagged I'll build roads for tourists to ride on. Hell,I done it before, ain't I? I'm just a lonesome old hobo, ain't got no money, ain't got no home, but I got me one thing; I got me a disease that's eating me up. My skin's cracking open, my teeth are falling out, and you know what? I can feel myself turning bad like an apple that's going soft, I can feel it happening, eating from the inside to the out, eating, eating, eating me.
Eddie pulled the stiffening blanket aside, tweezing at it with his thumb and forefinger, grimacing at its matted feel. One of those low cellar windows was directly behind it, one pane broken, the other opaque with dirt. He leaned forward, now feeling almost hypnotized. He leaned closer to the window, closer to the cellar-darkness, breathing in that smell of age and must and dry-rot, closer and closer to the black, and surely the leper would have caught him if his asthma hadn't picked that exact moment to kick up. It cramped his lungs with a weight that was painless yet frightening; his breath at once took on the familiar hateful whistling sound.
He drew back, and that was when the face appeared. Its coming was so sudden, so startling (and yet at the same time so expected), that Eddie could not have screamed even if he hadn't been having an asthma attack. His eyes bulged. His mouth creaked open. It was not the hobo with the flayed nose, but there were resemblances. Terrible resemblances. And yet ... this thing could not be human. Nothing could be so eaten up and remain alive.
The skin of its forehead was split open. White bone, coated with a membrane of yellow mucusy stuff, peered through like the lens of a bleary searchlight. The nose was a bridge of raw gristle above two red flaring channels. One eye was a gleeful blue. The other socket was filled with a mass of spongy brown-black tissue. The leper's lower lip sagged like liver. It had no upper lip at all; its teeth poked out in a sneering ring.
It shot one hand out through the broken pane. It shot the other through the dirty glass to the left, shattering it to fragments. Its questing, clutching hands crawled with sores. Beetles crawled and lumbered busily to and fro.
Mewling, gasping, Eddie hunched his way backward. He could hardly breathe. His heart was a runaway engine in his chest. The leper appeared to be wearing the ragged remains of some strange silvery suit. Things were crawling in the straggles of its brown hair.
"How bout a blowjob, Eddie?" the apparition croaked, grinning with its remains of a mouth. It lilted, "Bobby does it for a dime, he will do it anytime, fifteen cents for overtime." It winked. "That's me, Eddie--Bob Gray. And now that we've been properly introduced ..." One of its hands splatted against Eddie's right shoulder. Eddie screamed thinly.
"That's all right," the leper said, and Eddie saw with dreamlike terror that it was crawling out of the window. The bony shield behind its peeling forehead snapped the thin wooden strip between the two panes. Its hands clawed through the leafy, mulchy earth. The silver shoulders of its suit ... costume ... whatever it was ... began to push through the gap. That one glaring blue eye never left Eddie's face.
"Here I come, Eddie, that's all right," it croaked. "You'll like it down here with us. Some of your friends are down here."
Its hand reached out again, and in some corner of his panic-maddened, screaming mind, Eddie was suddenly, coldly sure that if that thing touched his bare skin, he would begin to rot, too. The thought broke his paralysis. He skittered backward on his hands and knees, then turned and lunged for the far end of the porch. Sunlight, falling in narrow dusty beams through the cracks between the porch boards, striped his face from moment to moment. His head pushed through the dusty cobwebs that settled in his hair. He looked back over his shoulder and saw that the leper was halfway out.
"It won't do you any good to run, Eddie," it called.
Eddie had reached the far end of the porch. There was a latticework skirt here. The sun shone through it, printing diamonds of light on his cheeks and forehead. He lowered his head and slammed into it with no hesitation at all, tearing the entire skirt free with a scream of rusted ha'penny nails. There was a tangle of rosebushes beyond and Eddie tore through these, stumbling to his feet as he did so, not feeling the thorns that scrawled shallow cuts along his arms and cheeks and neck.
He turned and backed away on buckling legs, pulling his aspirator out of his pocket, triggering it. Surely it hadn't really happened? He had been thinking about that hobo and his mind had ... well, had just
(put on a show)
shown him a movie, a horror movie, like one of those Saturday-matinee pictures with Frankenstein and Wolfman that they had sometimes at the Bijou or the Gem or the Aladdin. Sure, that was all. He had scared himself! What an asshole!
There was even time to utter a shaky laugh at the unsuspected vividness of his imagination before the rotting hands shot out from under the porch, clawing at the rosebushes with mindless ferocity, pulling at them, stripping them, printing beads of blood on them.
Eddie shrieked.
The leper was crawling out. It was wearing a clown suit, he saw--a clown suit with big orange buttons down the front. It saw Eddie and grinned. Its half-mouth dropped open and its tongue lolled out. Eddie shrieked again, but no one could have heard one boy's breathless shriek under the pounding of the diesel engine in the trainyard. The leper's tongue had not just dropped from its mouth; it was at least three feet long and had unrolled like a party-favor. It came to an arrow-point which dragged in the dirt. Foam, thick-sticky and yellowish, coursed along it. Bugs crawled over it.
The rosebushes, which had been showing the first touches of spring green when Eddie broke through them, now turned a dead and lacy black.
"Blowjob," the leper whispered, and tottered to its feet.
Eddie raced for his bike. It was the same race as before, only it now had the quality of a nightmare, where you can only move with the most agonizing slowness no matter how hard you try to go fast ... and in those dreams didn't you always hear or feel something, some It, gaining on you? Didn't you always smell Its stinking breath, as Eddie was smelling it now?
Fo a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying ... but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.
He did not try to mount his bike immediately; he ran with it instead, head down, pushing the handlebars. He felt as if he was drowning, not in water but inside his own chest.
"Blowjob," the leper whispered again. "Come back anytime, Eddie. Bring your friends."
Its rotting fingers seemed to touch the back of his neck, but perhaps that was only a dangling strand of cobweb from under the porch, caught in his hair and brushing against his shrinking flesh. Eddie leaped onto his bike and pedaled away, not caring that his throat had closed up tight as Tillie again, not giving two sucks for his asthma, not looking back. He didn't look back until he was almost home, and of course there was nothing behind him when he finally did but two kids headed over to the park to play ball.
That night, lying straight as a poker in bed, one hand folded tightly around his aspirator, looking into the shadows, he heard the leper whisper: It won't do you any good to run, Eddie.
8
"Wow," Richie said respectfully. It was the first thing any of them had said since Bill Denbrough finished his story.
"H-Have you g-g-got a-another suh-suh-higgarette, R-R-Richie?"
Richie gave him the last one in the pack he had hawked almost empty from his dad's desk drawer. He even lit it for Bill.
"You didn't dream it, Bill?" Stan asked suddenly.
Bill shook his head. "N-N-No duh-dream."
"Real," Eddie said in a low voice.
Bill looked at him sharply. "Wh-Wh-What?"
"Real, I said." Eddie looked at him almost resentfully. "It really happened. It was real. And before he could stop himself--before he even knew he was going to do it--Eddie found himself telling the story of the leper that had come crawling out of the basement at 29 Neibolt Street. Halfway through the telling he began to gasp and had to use his aspirator. And at the end he burst into shrill tears, his thin body shaking.
They all looked at him uncomfortably, and then Stan put a hand on his back. Bill gave him an awkward hug while the others glanced away, embarrassed.
"That's a-all right, E-Eddie. It's o-o-okay."
"I saw it too," Ben Hanscom said suddenly. His voice was flat and harsh and scared.
Eddie looked up, his face still naked with tears, his eyes red and raw-looking. "What?"
"I saw the clown," Ben said. "Only he wasn't like you said--at least not when I saw him. He wasn't all gooshy. He was ... he was dry." He paused, ducked his head, and looked at his hands, which lay palely on his elephantine thighs. "I think he was the mummy."
"Like in the movies?" Eddie asked.
"Like that but not like that," Ben said slowly. "In the movies he looks fake. It's scary, but you can tell it's a put-up job, you know? All those bandages, they look too neat, or something. But this guy ... he looked the way a real mummy would look, I think. If you actually found one in a room under a pyramid, I mean. Except for the suit."
"Wuh-wuh-wuh-hut suh-hoot?"
Ben looked at Eddie. "A silver suit with big orange buttons down the front."
Eddie's mouth dropped open. He shut it and said, "If you're kidding, say so. I still ... I still dream about that guy under the porch."
"It's not a joke," Ben said, and began to tell the story. He told it slowly, beginning with his volunteering to help Mrs. Douglas count and store books and ending with his own bad dreams. He spoke slowly, not looking at the others. He spoke as if deeply ashamed of his own behavior. He didn't raise his head again until the story was over.
"You must have dreamed it," Richie said finally. He saw Ben wince and hurried on: "Now don't take it personal, Big Ben, but you got to see that balloons can't, like, float against the wind--"
"Pictures can't wink, either," Ben said.
Richie looked from Ben to Bill, troubled. Accusing Ben of dreaming awake was one thing; accusing Bill was something else. Bill was their leader, the guy they all looked up to. No one said so out loud; no one needed to. But Bill was the idea man, the guy who could think of something to do on a boring day, the guy who remembered games the others had forgotten. And in some odd way they all sensed something comfortingly adult about Bill--perhaps it was a sense of accountability, a feeling that Bill would take the responsibility if responsibility needed to be taken. The truth was, Richie believed Bill's story, crazy as it was. And perhaps he didn't want to believe Ben's ... or Eddie's, for that matter.
"Nothing like that ever happened to you, huh?" Eddie asked Richie.
Richie paused, began to say something, shook his head, paused again, then said: "Scariest thing I've seen lately was Mark Prenderlist takin a leak in McCarron Park. Ugliest hogger you ever saw."
Ben said, "What about you, Stan?"
"No," Stan said quickly, and looked somewhere else. His small face was pale, his lips pressed together so tightly they were white.
"W-W-Was there suh-homething, S-St-Stan?" Bill asked.
"No, I told you!" Stan got to his feet and walked to the embankment, hands in his pockets. He stood watching the water course over the top of the original dam and pile up behind the second watergate.
"Come on, now, Stanley!" Richie said in a shrill falsetto. This was another of his Voices: Granny Grunt. When speaking in his Granny Grunt Voice, Richie would hobble around with one fist against the small of his back, and cackle a lot. He still, however, sounded more like Richie Tozier than anyone else.
"Fess up, Stanley, tell your old Granny about the baaaaad clown and I'll give you a chocker-chip cookie. You just tell--"
"Shut up!" Stan yelled suddenly, whirling on Richie, who fell back a step or two, astonished. "Just shut up!"
"Yowza, boss," Richie said, and sat down. He looked at Stan Uris mistrustfully. Bright spots of color flamed in Stan's cheeks, but he still looked more scared than mad.
"That's okay," Eddie said quietly. "Never mind, Stan."
"It wasn't a clown," Stanley said. His eyes flicked from one of them to the next to the next to the next. He seemed to struggle with himself.
"Y-Y-You can t-tell," Bill said, also speaking quietly. "W-We d-d-did."
"It wasn't a clown. It was--"
Which was when the carrying, whiskey-roughened tones of Mr. Nell interrupted, making them all jump as if they had been shot: "Jay-sus Christ on a jumped-up chariot-driven crutch! Look at this mess! Jaysus Christ!"
CHAPTER 8
Georgie's Room and the House on Neibolt Street
1
Richard Tozier turns off the radio, which has been blaring out Madonna's "Like a Virgin" on WZON (a station which declares itself to be "Bangor's AM stereo rocker!" with a kind of hysterical frequency), pulls over to the side of the road, shuts down the engine of the Mustang the Avis people rented him at Bangor International, and gets out. He hears the pull and release of his own breath in his ears. He has seen a sign which has caused the flesh of his back to break out in hard ridges of gooseflesh.
He walks to the front of the car and puts one hand on its hood. He hears the engine ticking softly to itself as it cools. He hears a jay scream briefly and then shut up. There are crickets. And as far as the soundtrack goes, that's it.
He has seen the sign, he passes it, and suddenly he is in Derry again. After twenty-five years Richie "Trashmouth" Tozier has come home. He has--
Burning agony suddenly needles into his eyes, breaking his thought cleanly off. He utters a strangled little shout and his hands fly up to his face. The only time he felt anything even remotely like this burning pain was when he got an eyelash caught under one of his contacts in college--and that was only in one eye. This terrible pain is in both.
Before he can reach even halfway to his face, the pain is gone.
He lowers his hands again slowly, thoughtfully, and looks down Route 7. He left the turnpike at the Etna-Haven exit, wanting, for some reason he doesn't understand, not to come in by the turnpike, which was still under construction in the Derry area when he and his folks shook the dust of this weird little town from their heels and headed out for the Midwest. No--the turnpike would have been quicker, but it would have been wrong.
So he had driven along Route 9 through the sleeping nestle of buildings that was Haven Village, then turned off on Route 7. And as he went the day grew steadily brighter.
Now this sign. It was the same sort of sign which marked the borders of more than six hundred Maine towns, but how this one had squeezed his heart!
Beyond that an Elks sign; a Rotary Club sign; and completing the trinity, a sign proclaiming the fact that DERRY LIONS ROAR FOR THE UNITED FUND! Past that one there is just Route 7 again, continuing on in a straight line between bulking banks of pine and spruce. In this silent light as the day steadies itself those trees look as dreamy as blue-gray cigarette smoke stacked on the moveless air of a sealed room.
Derry, he thinks. Derry, God help me. Derry. Stone the crows.
Here he is on Route 7. Five miles up, if time or tornado has not carried it away