Seen from the expressway at quarter to five in the morning, Boston seems a city of the dead brooding over some tragedy in its past—a plague, perhaps, or a curse. The smell of salt, heavy and cloying, comes off the ocean.
Runners of early-morning fog obscure much of what movement would be seen otherwise.
Driving north along Storrow Drive, sitting behind the wheel of the black ’84 Cadillac he picked up from Butch Carrington at Cape Cod Limousine, Eddie Kaspbrak thinks you can feel this city’s age; perhaps you can get that feeling of age nowhere else in America but here. Boston is a sprat
compared with London, an infant compared with Rome, but by American standards at least it is old, old. It kept its place on these low hills three
hundred years ago, when the Tea and Stamp Taxes were unthought of, Paul Revere and Patrick Henry unborn.
Its age, its silence, and the foggy smell of the sea—all of these things
make Eddie nervous. When Eddie’s nervous he reaches for his aspirator. He sticks it in his mouth and triggers a cloud of revivifying spray down his
throat.
There are a few people in the streets he’s passing, and a pedestrian or two on the walkways of the overpasses—they give lie to the impression that he has somehow wandered into a Lovecrafty tale of doomed cities, ancient evils, and monsters with unpronounceable names. Here, ganged around a bus stop with a sign reading KENMORE SQUARE CITY CENTER, he sees waitresses, nurses, city employees, their faces naked and puffed with sleep.
That’s right, Eddie thinks, now passing under a sign which reads TOBIN BRIDGE. That’s right, stick to the buses. Forget the subways. The subways
are a bad idea; I wouldn’t go down there if I were you. Not down below. Not in the tunnels.
This is a bad thought to have; if he doesn’t get rid of it he will soon be using the aspirator again. He’s glad for the heavier traffic on the Tobin Bridge. He passes a monument works. Painted on the brick side is a slightly unsettling admonishment: SLOW DOWN! WE CAN WAIT!
Here is a green reflectorized sign which reads TO 95 MAINE, N. H. , ALL NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND POINTS. He looks at it and suddenly a bone-deep shudder wracks his body. His hands momentarily weld
themselves to the wheel of the Cadillac. He would like to believe it is the onset of some sickness, a virus or perhaps one of his mother’s “phantom fevers, ” but he knows better. It is the city behind him, poised silently on the straight-edge that runs between day and night, and what that sign promises ahead of him. He’s sick, all right, no doubt about that, but it’s not a virus or a phantom fever. He has been poisoned by his own memories.
I’m scared, Eddie thinks. That was always what was at the bottom of it.
Just being scared. That was everything. But in the end I think we turned that around somehow. We used it. But how?
He can’t remember. He wonders if any of the others can. For all their sakes he certainly hopes so.
A truck drones by on his left. Eddie has still got his lights on and now he hits his brights momentarily as the truck draws safely ahead. He does this without thinking. It has become an automatic function, just part of driving for a living. The unseen driver in the truck flashes his running lights in return, quickly, twice, thanking Eddie for his courtesy. If only everything could be that simple and that clear, he thinks.
He follows the signs to 1-95. The northbound traffic is light, although he observes that the southbound lanes into the city are starting to fill up, even at this early hour. Eddie floats the big car along, pre-guessing most of the directional signs and getting into the correct lane long before he has to. It has been years—literally years—since he has guessed wrong enough to be swept past an exit he wanted. He makes his lane-choices as automatically as he flashed “okay to cut back in” to the trucker, as automatically as he
once found his way through the tangle of paths in the Derry Barrens. The fact that he has never before in his life driven out of downtown Boston, one
of the most confusing cities in America to drive in, does not seem to matter much at all.
He suddenly remembers something else about that summer, something Bill said to him one day: “Y-You’ve g-got a c-c-cuh-hompass in your head, E-E-Eddie. ”
How that had pleased him! It pleases him again as the ‘84 ’Dorado
shoots back onto the turnpike. He slides the limo’s speed up to a cop-safe fifty-seven miles an hour and finds some quiet music on the radio. He
supposes he would have died for Bill back then, if that had been required; if Bill had asked him, Eddie would simply have responded: “Sure, Big Bill . . . you got a time in mind yet? ”
Eddie laughs at this—not much of a sound, just a snort, but the sound of it startles him into a real laugh. He laughs seldom these days, and he
certainly did not expect to find many chucks (Richie’s word, meaning chuckles, as in “You had any good chucks today, Eds? ”) on this black pilgrimage. But, he supposes, if God is dirty-mean enough to curse the faithful with what they want most in life, He’s maybe quirky enough to deal you a good chuck or two along the way.
“Had any good chucks lately, Eds? ” he says out loud, and laughs again.
Man, he had hated it when Richie called him Eds . . . but he had sort of liked it, too. The way he thought Ben Hanscom got to like Richie calling
him Haystack. It was something . . . like a secret name. A secret identity. A way to be people that had nothing to do with their parents’ fears, hopes, constant demands. Richie couldn’t do his beloved Voices for shit, but maybe he did know how important it was for creeps like them to sometimes be
different people.
Eddie glances at the change lined up neatly on the ’Dorado’s dashboard
—lining up the change is another of those automatic tricks of the trade. When the tollbooths come up, you never want to have to dig for your silver, never want to find that you’ve gotten in an automatic-toll lane with the
wrong change.
Among the coins are two or three Susan B. Anthony silver dollars. They are coins, he reflects, that you probably only find in the pockets of
chauffeurs and taxi-drivers from the New York area these days, just as the only place you are apt to see a lot of two-dollar bills is at a race-track
payoff window. He always keeps a few on hand because the robot tolltaker baskets on the George Washington and the Triboro Bridges take them.
Another of those lights suddenly comes on in his head: silver dollars. Not these fake copper sandwiches but real silver dollars, with Lady Liberty
dressed in her gauzy robes stamped upon them. Ben Hanscom’s silver dollars. Yes, but wasn’t it Bill or Ben or Beverly who once used one of those silver cartwheels to save their lives? He is not quite sure of this, is, in fact, not quite sure of anything . . . or is it just that he doesn’t want to remember?
It was dark in there, he thinks suddenly. I remember that much. It was dark in there.
Boston is well behind him now and the fog is starting to bum off. Ahead is MAINE, N. H. , ALL NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND POINTS. Derry is
ahead, and there is something in Derry which should be twenty-seven years dead and yet is somehow not. Something with as many faces as Lon Chaney.
But what is it really? Didn’t they see it at the end as it really was, with all its masks cast aside?
Ah, he can remember so much . . . but not enough.
He remembers that he loved Bill Denbrough; he remembers that well enough. Bill never made fun of his asthma. Bill never called him little sissy queerboy. He loved Bill like he would have loved a big brother . . . or a
father. Bill knew stuff to do. Places to go. Things to see. Bill was never up against it. When you ran with Bill you ran to beat the devil and you laughed
. . . but you hardly ever ran out of breath. And hardly ever running out of breath was great, so fucking great, Eddie would tell the world. When you ran with Big Bill, you got your chucks every day.
“Sure, kid, EV-ery day, ” he says in a Richie Tozier Voice, and laughs again.
It had been Bill’s idea to make the dam in the Barrens, and it was, in a way, the dam that had brought them all together. Ben Hanscom had been the one to show them how the dam could be built—and they had built it so
well that they’d gotten in a lot of trouble with Mr. Nell, the cop on the beat
—but it had been Bill’s idea. And although all of them except Richie had seen very odd things—frightening things—in Derry since the turn of the
year, it had been Bill who had first found the courage to say something out loud.
That dam.
That damn dam.
He remembered Victor Criss: “Ta-ta, boys. It was a real baby dam, believe me. You’re better off without it. ”
A day later, Ben Hanscom was grinning at them, saying: “We could
“We could flood
“We could flood out the
2
whole Barrens if we wanted to. ”
Bill and Eddie looked at Ben doubtfully and then at the stuff Ben had brought along with him: some boards (scrounged from Mr. McKibbon’s back yard, but that was okay, since Mr. McKibbon had probably scavenged them from someone else’s), a sledgehammer, a shovel.
“I dunno, ” Eddie said, glancing at Bill. “When we tried yesterday, it didn’t work very good. The current kept washing our sticks away. ”
“This’ll work, ” Ben said. He also looked to Bill for the final decision.
“Well, let’s g-give it a t-t-try, ” Bill said. “I c-called R-R-R- Richie Tozier this m-morning. He’s g-gonna be oh-over l-later, he s-said. Maybe him and Stuh-huh-hanley will want to h-help. ”
“Stanley who? ” Ben asked.
“Uris, ” Eddie said. He was still looking cautiously at Bill, who seemed somehow different today—quieter, less enthusiastic about the idea of the dam. Bill looked pale today. Distant.
“Stanley Uris? I guess I don’t know him. Does he go to Derry Elementary? ”
“He’s our age but he just finished the fourth grade, ” Eddie said. “He started school a year late because he was sick a lot when he was a little kid. You think you took chong yesterday, you just oughtta be glad you’re not Stan. Someone’s always rackin Stan to the dogs an back. ”
“He’s Juh-juh-hooish, ” Bill said. “Luh-lots of k-kids don’t luh-hike him because h-he’s Jewish. ”
“Oh yeah? ” Ben asked, impressed. “Jewish, huh? ” He paused and then said carefully: “Is that like being Turkish, or is it more like, you know,
Egyptian? ”
“I g-guess it’s more like Tur-hur-hurkish, ” Bill said. He picked up one of the boards Ben had brought and looked at it. It was about six feet long and
three feet wide. “My d-d-dad says most J-Jews have big nuh-noses and lots of m-m-money, but Stuh-Stuh-Stuh—”
“But Stan’s got a regular nose and he’s always broke, ” Eddie said.
“Yeah, ” Bill said, and broke into a real grin for the first time that day. Ben grinned.
Eddie grinned.
Bill tossed the board aside, got up and brushed off the seat of his jeans.
He walked to the edge of the stream and the other two boys joined him. Bill shoved his hands in his back pockets and sighed deeply. Eddie was sure Bill was going to say something serious. He looked from Eddie to Ben and then back to Eddie again, not smiling now. Eddie was suddenly afraid.
But all Bill said then was, “You got your ah-ah-aspirator, E-Eddie? ” Eddie slapped his pocket. “I’m loaded for bear. ”
“Say, how’d it work with the chocolate milk? ” Ben asked.
Eddie laughed. “Worked great!” he said. He and Ben broke up while Bill looked at them, smiling but puzzled. Eddie explained and Bill nodded, grinning again.
“E-E-Eddie’s muh-hum is w-w-worried that h-he’s g-gonna break and sh- she wuh-hon’t be able to g-get a re-re-refund. ”
Eddie snorted and made as if to push him into the stream.
“Watch it, fuckface, ” Bill said, sounding uncannily like Henry Bowers. “I’ll twist your head so far around you’ll be able to watch when you wipe yourself. ”
Ben collapsed, shrieking with laughter. Bill glanced at him, still smiling, hands still in the back pockets of his jeans, smiling, yeah, but a little distant again, a little vague. He looked at Eddie and then cocked his head toward Ben.
“Kid’s suh-suh-soft, ” he said.
“Yeah, ” Eddie agreed, but he felt somehow that they were only going through the motions of having a good time. Something was on Bill’s mind.
He supposed Bill would spill it when he was ready; the question was, did Eddie want to hear what it was? “Kid’s mentally retarded. ”
“Retreaded, ” Ben said, still giggling.
“Y-You g-g-gonna sh-show us how to b-build a dam or a-are you g-g- gonna si-hit there on your b-big c-c-can all d-day? ”
Ben got to his feet again. He looked first at the stream, flowing past them at moderate speed. The Kenduskeag was not terribly wide this far up in the Barrens, but it had defeated them yesterday just the same. Neither Eddie nor Bill had been able to figure out how to get a foothold on the current. But Ben was smiling, the smile of one who contemplates doing something new .
. . something that will be fun but not very hard. Eddie thought: He knows how—I really think he does.
“Okay, ” he said. “You guys want to take your shoes off, because you’re gonna get your little footsies wet. ”
The mind-mother in Eddie’s head spoke up at once, her voice as stern and commanding as the voice of a traffic cop: Don’t you dare do it, Eddie! Don’t you dare! Wet feet, that’s one way—one of the thousands of ways— that colds start, and colds lead to pneumonia, so don’t you do it!
Bill and Ben were sitting on the bank, pulling off their sneakers and socks. Ben was fussily rolling up the legs of his jeans. Bill looked up at Eddie. His eyes were clear and warm, sympathetic. Eddie was suddenly
sure Big Bill knew exactly what he had been thinking, and he was ashamed. “Y-You c-c-comin? ”
“Yeah, sure, ” Eddie said. He sat down on the bank and undressed his feet while his mother ranted inside his head . . . but her voice was growing steadily more distant and echoey, he was relieved to note, as if someone had stuck a heavy fishhook through the back of her blouse and was now reeling her away from him down a very long corridor.
3
It was one of those perfect summer days which, in a world where everything was on track and on the beam, you would never forget. A
moderate breeze kept the worst of the mosquitoes and blackflies away. The
sky was a bright, crisp blue. Temperatures were in the low seventies. Birds sang and went about their birdy-business in the bushes and second-growth trees. Eddie had to use his aspirator once, and then his chest lightened and his throat seemed to widen magically to the size of a freeway. He spent the rest of the morning with it stuffed forgotten into his back pocket.
Ben Hanscom, who had seemed so timid and unsure the day before, became a confident general once he was fully involved in the actual
construction of the dam. Every now and then he would climb the bank and stand there with his muddy hands on his hips, looking at the work in
progress and muttering to himself. Sometimes he would run a hand through his hair, and by eleven o’clock it was standing up in crazy, comical spikes.
Eddie felt uncertainty at first, then a sense of glee, and finally an entirely new feeling—one that was at the same time weird, terrifying, and exhilarating. It was a feeling so alien to his usual state of being that he was not able to put a name to it until that night, lying in bed and looking at the ceiling and replaying the day. Power. That was what that feeling had been. Power. It was going to work, by God, and it was going to work better than he and Bill—maybe even Ben himself—had dreamed it could.
He could see Bill getting involved, too—only a little at first, still mulling over whatever it was he had on his mind, and then, bit by bit, committing himself fully. Once or twice he clapped Ben on one meaty shoulder and told him he was unbelievable. Ben flushed with pleasure each time.
Ben got Eddie and Bill to set one of the boards across the stream and hold it as he used the sledgehammer to seat it in the streambed. “There—it’s in, but you’ll have to hold it or the current’ll just pull it loose, ” he told Eddie, so Eddie stood in the middle of the stream holding the board while water sluiced over its top and made his hands into wavering starfish shapes.
Ben and Bill located a second board two feet downstream of the first.
Ben used the sledge again to seat it and Bill held it while Ben began to fill up the space between the two boards with sandy earth from the stream- bank. At first it only washed away around the ends of the boards in gritty clouds and Eddie didn’t think it was going to work at all, but when Ben began adding rocks and muddy gook from the streambed, the clouds of escaping silt began to diminish. In less than twenty minutes he had created a heaped brown canal of earth and stones between the two boards in the
middle of the stream. To Eddie it looked like an optical illusion.
“If we had real cement . . . instead of just . . . mud and rocks, they’d have to move the whole city . . . over to the Old Cape side by the middle of next week, ” Ben said, slinging the shovel aside at last and sitting on the bank until he got his breath back. Bill and Eddie laughed, and Ben grinned at them. When he grinned, there was a ghost of the handsome man he would become in the lines of his face. Water had begun to pile up behind the upstream board now.
Eddie asked what they were going to do about the water escaping around the sides.
“Let it go. It doesn’t matter. ” “It doesn’t? ”
“Nope. ”
“Why not? ”
“I can’t explain exactly. You gotta let some out, though. ” “How do you know? ”
Ben shrugged. I just do, the shrug said, and Eddie was silenced.
When he was rested, Ben got a third board—the thickest of the four or five he had carried laboriously across town to the Barrens—and placed it carefully against the downstream board, wedging one end firmly into the streambed and socking the other against the board Bill had been holding, creating the strut he had put in his little drawing the day before.
“Okay, ” he said, standing back. He grinned at them. “You guys should
be able to let go now. The gook in between the two boards will take most of the water pressure. The strut will take the rest. ”
“Won’t the water wash it away? ” Eddie asked. “Nope. The water is just gonna push it in deeper. ”
“And if you’re ruh-ruh-wrong, we g-get to k-k-kill yuh-you, ” Bill said. “That’s cool, ” Ben said amiably.
Bill and Eddie stepped back. The two boards that formed the basis of the dam creaked a little, tilted a little . . . and that was all.
“Hot shit!” Eddie screamed, excited. “It’s g-g-great, ” Bill said, grinning. “Yeah, ” Ben said. “Let’s eat. ”
4
They sat on the bank and ate, not talking much, watching the water stack up behind the dam and sluice around the ends of the boards. They had already done something to the geography of the streambanks, Eddie saw: the diverted current was cutting scalloped hollows into them. As he watched,
the new course of the stream undercut the bank enough on the far side to cause a small avalanche.
Upstream of the dam the water formed a roughly circular pool, and at one place it had actually overflowed the bank. Bright, reflecting rills ran off into the grass and the underbrush. Eddie slowly began to realize what Ben had known from the first: the dam was already built. The gaps between the
boards and the banks were sluiceways. Ben had not been able to tell Eddie this because he did not know the word. Above the boards the Kenduskeag had taken on a swelled look. The chuckling sound of shallow water babbling its way over stones and gravel was now gone; all the stones upstream of the dam were underwater. Every now and then more sod and dirt, undercut by the widening stream, would fall into the water with a splash.
Downstream of the dam the watercourse was nearly empty; thin trickles ran restlessly down its center, but that was about all. Stones which had been underwater for God knew how long were drying in the sun. Eddie looked at these drying stones with mild wonder . . . and that weird other feeling. They had done this. They. He saw a frog hopping along and thought maybe old Mr. Froggy was wondering just where the water had gone. Eddie laughed out loud.
Ben was neatly stowing his empty wrappers in the lunchbag he had brought. Both Eddie and Bill had been amazed by the size of the repast Ben had laid out with businesslike efficiency: two PB&J sandwiches, one
bologna sandwich, a hardcooked egg (complete with a pinch of salt twisted up in a small piece of waxed paper), two fig-bars, three large chocolate chip cookies, and a Ring-Ding.
“What did your ma say when she saw how bad you got racked? ” Eddie asked him.
“Hmmmm? ” Ben looked up from the spreading pool of water behind the dam and belched gently against the back of his hand. “Oh! Well, I knew she’d be grocery-shopping yesterday afternoon, so I was able to beat her home. I took a bath and washed my hair. Then I threw away the jeans and
the sweatshirt I was wearing. I don’t know if she’ll notice they’re gone or not. Probably not the sweatshirt, I got lots of sweatshirts, but I guess I ought to buy myself a new pair of jeans before she gets nosing through my drawers. ”
The thought of wasting his money on such a nonessential item cast momentary gloom across Ben’s face.
“W-W-What about the way yuh-you w-were b-bruised up? ”
“I told her I was so excited to be out of school that I ran out the door and fell down the steps, ” Ben said, and looked both amazed and a little hurt when Eddie and Bill began laughing. Bill, who had been chowing up a
piece of his mother’s devil’s food cake, blew out a brown jet of crumbs and then had a coughing fit. Eddie, still howling, clapped him on the back.
“Well, I almost did fall down the steps, ” Ben said. “Only it was because Victor Criss pushed me, not because I was running. ”
“I’d be as h-hot as a tuh-tuh-tamale in a swuh-heatshirt like that, ” Bill said, finishing the last bite of his cake.
Ben hesitated. For a moment it seemed he would say nothing. “It’s better when you’re fat, ” he said finally. “Sweatshirts, I mean. ”
“Because of your gut? ” Eddie asked.
Bill snorted. “Because of your tih-tih-tih—” “Yeah, my tits. So what? ”
“Yeah, ” Bill said mildly. “S-So what? ”
There was a moment of awkward silence and then Eddie said, “Look how dark the water’s getting when it goes around that side of the dam. ”
“Oh, cripes!” Ben shot to his feet. “Current’s pulling out the fill! Jeez, I wish we had cement!”
The damage was quickly repaired, but even Eddie could see what would happen without someone there to almost constantly shovel in fresh fill: erosion would eventually cause the upstream board to collapse against the downstream board, and then everything would fall over.
“We can shore up the sides, ” Ben said. “That won’t stop the erosion, but it’ll slow it down. ”
“If we use sand and mud, won’t it just go on washing away? ” Eddie asked.
“We’ll use chunks of sod. ”
Bill nodded, smiled, and made an O with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. “Let’s g-g-go. I’ll d-dig em and y-you sh-show me where to p- put em ih-in, Big Ben. ”
From behind them a stridently cheery voice called: “My Gawd, someone put the Y-pool down in the Barrens, bellybutton lint and all!”
Eddie turned, noticing the way Ben tightened up at the sound of a strange voice, the way his lips thinned. Standing above them and aways upstream, on the path Ben had crossed the day before, were Richie Tozier and Stanley Uris.
Richie came bopping down to the stream, glanced at Ben with some interest, and then pinched Eddie’s cheek.
“Don’t do that! I hate it when you do that, Richie. ”
“Ah, you love it, Eds, ” Richie said, and beamed at him. “So what do you say? You havin any good chucks, or what? ”
5
The five of them knocked off around four o’clock. They sat much higher on the bank—the place where Bill, Ben, and Eddie had eaten lunch was now underwater—and stared down at their handiwork. Even Ben found it a little difficult to believe. He felt a sense of tired accomplishment which was mixed with uneasy fright. He found himself thinking of Fantasia, and how Mickey Mouse had known enough to get the brooms started . . . but not enough to make them stop.
“Fucking incredible, ” Richie Tozier said softly, and pushed his glasses up on his nose.
Eddie glanced over at him, but Richie was not doing one of his numbers now; his face was thoughtful, almost solemn.
On the far side of the stream, where the land first rose and then tilted shallowly downhill, they had created a new piece of bogland. Bracken and holly bushes stood in a foot of water. Even as they sat here they could see
the bog sending out fresh pseudopods, spreading steadily westward. Behind the dam the Kenduskeag, shallow and harmless just this morning, had
become a still, swollen band of water.
By two o’clock the widening pool behind the dam had taken so much embankment that the spillways had grown almost to the size of rivers themselves. Everyone but Ben had gone on an emergency expedition to the dump in search of more materials. Ben stuck around, methodically sodding up leaks. The scavengers had returned not only with boards but with four bald tires, the rusty door of a 1949 Hudson Hornet, and a big piece of corrugated-steel siding. Under Ben’s leadership they had built two wings on the original dam, blocking off the water’s escape around the sides again— and, with the wings raked back at an angle against the current, the dam worked even better than before.
“Stopped that sucker cold, ” Richie said. “You’re a genius, man. ” Ben smiled. “It’s not so much. ”
“I got some Winstons, ” Richie said. “Who wants one? ”
He produced the crumpled red-and-white pack from his pants pocket and passed it around. Eddie, thinking of the hell a cigarette would raise with his asthma, refused. Stan also refused. Bill took one, and, after a moment’s thought, Ben took one, too. Richie produced a book of matches with the
words ROI-TAN on the outside, and lit first Ben’s cigarette, then Bill’s. He was about to light his own when Bill blew out the match.
“Thanks a lot, Denbrough, you wet, ” Richie said.
Bill smiled apologetically. “The-The-Three on a muh-muh-hatch, ” he said. “B-Bad luh-luh-luck. ”
“Bad luck for your folks when you were born, ” Richie said, and lit his
cigarette with another match. He lay down and crossed his arms beneath his head. The cigarette jutted upward between his teeth. “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should. ” He turned his head slightly and winked at Eddie. “Ain’t that right, Eds? ”
Ben, Eddie saw, was looking at Richie with a mixture of awe and wariness. Eddie could understand that. He had known Richie Tozier for four years, and he still didn’t really understand what Richie was about. He knew that Richie got A’s and B’s in his schoolwork, but he also knew that Richie regularly got C’s and D’s in deportment. His father really racked him about it and his mother just about cried every time Richie brought home those poor conduct grades, and Richie would swear to do better, and maybe he even would . . . for a quarter or two. The trouble with Richie was that he couldn’t keep still for more than a minute at a time and he couldn’t keep his
mouth shut at all. Down here in the Barrens that didn’t get him in much trouble, but the Barrens weren’t Never-Never Land and they couldn’t be the Wild Boys for more than a few hours at a stretch (the idea of a Wild Boy with an aspirator in his back pocket made Eddie smile). The trouble with
the Barrens was that you always had to leave. Out there in the wider world, Richie’s bullshit was always getting him in trouble—with adults, which was bad, and with guys like Henry Bowers, which was even worse.
His entrance earlier today was a perfect example. Ben Hanscom had no more than started to say hi when Richie had fallen on his knees at Ben’s feet. He then began a series of gigantic salaams, his arms outstretched, his hands fwapping against the muddy bank every time he bowed again. At the same time he had begun to speak in one of his Voices.
Richie had about a dozen different Voices. His ambition, he had told
Eddie one rainy afternoon when they were in the little raftered room over the Kaspbrak garage reading Little Lulu comic books, was to become the world’s greatest ventriloquist. He was going to be even greater than Edgar Bergen, he said, and he would be on The Ed Sullivan Show every week.
Eddie admired this ambition but foresaw problems with it. First, all of Richie’s Voices sounded pretty much like Richie Tozier. This was not to say Richie could not be very funny from time to time; he could be. When referring to verbal zingers and loud farts, Richie’s terminology was the same: he called it Getting Off A Good One, and he got off Good Ones of both types frequently . . . usually in inappropriate company, however.
Second, when Richie did ventriloquism, his lips moved. Not just a little, on the “p”- and “b”-sounds, but a lot, and on all the sounds. Third, when
Richie said he was going to throw his voice, it usually didn’t go very far.
Most of his friends were too kind—or too bemused with Richie’s
sometimes enchanting, often exhausting charm—to mention these little failings to him.
Salaaming frantically in front of the startled and embarrassed Ben Hanscom, Richie was speaking in what he called his Nigger Jim Voice.
“Lawks-a-mussy, it’s be Haystack Calhoun!” Richie screamed. “Don’t fall on me, Mistuh Haystack, suh! You’se gwineter cream me if you do! Lawks-a-mussy, lawks-a-mussy! Three hunnert pounds of swaingin meat, eighty-eight inches from tit to tit, Haystack be smellin jest like a loader
panther shit! I’se gwineter leadjer inter de raing, Mistuh Haystack, suh! I’se sho enuf gwineter leadjer! Jest don’tchoo be fallin on dis yere black boy!”
“D-Don’t wuh-worry, ” Bill said. “It’s j-j-just Ruh-Ruh-Richie. He’s c-c- crazy. ”
Richie bounced to his feet. “I heard that, Denbrough. You better leave me alone or I’ll sic Haystack here on you. ”
“B-Best p-p-part of you r-ran down your fuh-fuh-hather’s l-l-leg, ” Bill said.
“True, ” Richie said, “but look how much good stuff was left. How ya doin, Haystack? Richie Tozier is my name, doing Voices is my game. ” He popped his hand out. Thoroughly confused, Ben reached for it. Richie pulled his hand back. Ben blinked. Relenting, Richie shook.
“My name’s Ben Hanscom, in case you’re interested, ” Ben said.
“Seen you around school, ” Richie said. He swept a hand at the spreading pool of water. “This must have been your idea. These wet ends couldn’t light a firecracker with a flamethrower. ”
“Speak for yourself, Richie, ” Eddie said.
“Oh—you mean it was your idea, Eds? Jesus, I’m sorry. ” He fell down in front of Eddie and began salaaming wildly again.
“Get up, stop it, you’re splattering mud on me!” Eddie cried.
Richie jumped to his feet a second time and pinched Eddie’s cheek. “Cute, cute, cute!” Richie exclaimed.
“Stop it, I hate that!”
“Fess up, Eds—who built the dam? ” “B-B-Ben sh-showed us, ” Bill said.
“Good deal. ” Richie turned and discovered Stanley Uris standing behind him, hands in his pockets, watching quietly as Richie put on his show. “This here’s Stan the Man Uris, ” Richie told Ben. “Stan’s a Jew. Also, he killed Christ. At least that’s what Victor Criss told me one day. I been after Stan ever since. I figure if he’s that old, he ought to be able to buy us some beer. Right, Stan? ”
“I think that must have been my father, ” Stan said in a low, pleasant voice, and that broke them all up, Ben included. Eddie laughed until he was wheezing and tears were running down his face.
“A Good One!” Richie cried, striding around with his arms thrown up over his head like a football referee signalling that the extra point was good.
“Stan the Man Gets Off A Good One! Great Moments in History! Yowza- Yowza-YOWza!”
“Hi. ” Stan said to Ben, seeming to take no notice of Richie at all. “Hello, ” Ben replied. “We were in the same class in second grade. You
were the kid who—”
“—never said anything, ” Stan finished, smiling a little. “Right. ”
“Stan wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful, ” Richie said. “Which he
FREE-quently does—yowza-yowza-YOW—” “Sh-Sh-Shut uh-up, Richie, ” Bill said.
“Okay, but first I have to tell you one more thing, much as I hate to. I think you’re losing your dam. Valley’s gonna flood, pardners. Let’s get the women and children out first. ”
And without bothering to roll up his pants—or even to remove his
sneakers—Richie jumped into the water and began to slam sods into place on the nearside wing of the dam, where the persistent current was pulling fill out in muddy streamers again. A piece of Red Cross adhesive tape was wrapped around one of the bows of his glasses, and the loose end flapped against his cheekbone as he worked. Bill caught Eddie’s eye, smiled a little, and shrugged. It was just Richie. He could drive you bugshit . . . but it was still sort of nice to have him around.
They worked on the dam for the next hour or so. Richie took Ben’s commands—which had become rather tentative again, with two more kids to general—with perfect willingness, and fulfilled them at a manic pace.
When each mission was completed he reported back to Ben for further orders, executing a backhand British salute and snapping the soggy heels of his sneakers together. Every now and then he would begin to harangue the others in one of his Voices: the German Commandant, Toodles the English
Butler, the Southern Senator (who sounded quite a bit like Foghorn Leghorn and who would, in the fullness of time, evolve into a character named Buford Kissdrivel), the MovieTone Newsreel Narrator.
The work did not just go forward; it sprinted forward. And now, shortly before five o’clock, as they sat resting on the bank, it seemed that what
Richie had said was true: they had stopped the sucker cold. The car door,
the piece of corrugated steel, and the old tires had become the second stage of the dam, and it was backstopped by a huge sloping hill of earth and
stones. Bill, Ben, and Richie smoked; Stan was lying on his back. A stranger might have thought he was just looking at the sky, but Eddie knew better. Stan was looking into the trees on the other side of the stream, keeping an eye out for a bird or two he could write up in his bird notebook that night. Eddie himself just sat cross-legged, feeling pleasantly tired and rather mellow. At that moment the others seemed to him like the greatest bunch of guys to chum with a fellow could ever hope to have. They felt right together; they fitted neatly against each other’s edges. He couldn’t explain it to himself any better than that, and since it didn’t really seem to need any explaining, he decided he ought to just let it be.
He looked over at Ben, who was holding his half-smoked cigarette clumsily and spitting frequently, as if he didn’t like the taste of it much. As Eddie watched, Ben stubbed it out and covered the long butt with dirt.
Ben looked up, saw Eddie watching him, and looked away, embarrassed. Eddie glanced at Bill and saw something on Bill’s face that he didn’t like.
Bill was looking across the water and into the trees and bushes on the far side, his eyes gray and thoughtful. That brooding expression was back on his face. Eddie thought Bill looked almost haunted.
As if reading his thought, Bill looked around at him. Eddie smiled, but Bill didn’t smile back. He put his cigarette out and looked around at the others. Even Richie had withdrawn into the silence of his own thoughts, an event which occurred about as seldom as a lunar eclipse.
Eddie knew that Bill rarely said anything important unless it was perfectly quiet, because it was so hard for him to speak. And he suddenly wished he had something to say, or that Richie would start in with one of
his Voices. He was suddenly sure Bill was going to open his mouth and say something terrible, something which would change everything. Eddie reached automatically for his aspirator, pulled it out of his back pocket, and held it in his hand. He did this without even thinking about it.
“C-Can I tell you g-g-guys suh-homething? ” Bill asked.
They all looked at him. Crack a joke, Richie! Eddie thought. Crack a joke, say something really outrageous, embarrass him, I don’t care, just shut him up. Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want things to change, I don’t want to be scared.
In his mind a tenebrous, croaking voice whispered: I’ll do it for a dime.
Eddie shuddered and tried to unthink that voice, and the sudden image it called up in his mind: the house on Neibolt Street, its front yard overgrown with weeds, gigantic sunflowers nodding in the untended garden off to one side.
“Sure, Big Bill, ” Richie said. “What’s up? ”
Bill opened his mouth (more anxiety on Eddie’s part), closed it (blessed relief for Eddie), and then opened it again (renewed anxiety).
“I-I-If you guh-guh-guys 1-1-laugh, I-I’ll never h-hang around with you again, ” Bill said. “It’s cuh-cuh-crazy, but I swear I’m not muh-haking it up. It r-r-really happened. ”
“We won’t laugh, ” Ben said. He looked around at the others. “Will we? ” Stan shook his head. So did Richie.
Eddie wanted to say, Yes we will too, Billy, we’ll laugh our heads off and say you’re really stupid, so why don’t you shut up right now? But of course he could not say any such thing. This was, after all, Big Bill. He shook his head miserably. No, he wouldn’t laugh. He had never felt less like laughing in his life.
They sat there above the dam Ben had showed them how to make, looking from Bill’s face to the expanding pool and the likewise expanding bog beyond it and then back to Bill’s face again, listening silently as he told them about what had happened when he opened George’s photograph
album—how Georgie’s school photograph had turned its head and winked at him, how the book had bled when he threw it across the room. It was a long, painful recital, and by the time he finished Bill was red-faced and sweating. Eddie had never heard him stutter so badly.
At last, though, the tale was told. Bill looked around at them, both defiant and afraid. Eddie saw an identical expression on the faces of Ben, Richie, and Stan. It was solemn, awed fear. It was not in the slightest tinctured by disbelief. An urge came to him then, an urge to spring to his feet and shout: What a crazy story! You don’t believe that crazy story, do you, and even if you do, you don’t believe we believe it, do you? School pictures can’t wink! Books can’t bleed! You’re out of your mind, Big Bill!
But he couldn’t very well do so, because that expression of solemn fear was also on his own face. He couldn’t see it but he could feel it.
Come back here, kid, the hoarse voice whispered. I’ll blow you for free.
Come back here!
No, Eddie moaned at it. Please, go away, I don’t want to think about that. Come back here, kid.
And now Eddie saw something else—not on Richie’s face, at least he didn’t think so, but on Stan’s and Ben’s for sure. He knew what that something else was; knew because that expression was on his own face, too.
Recognition.
I’ll blow you for free.
The house at 29 Neibolt Street was just outside the Derry trainyards. It was old and boarded up, its porch gradually sinking back into the ground,
its lawn an overgrown field. An old trike, rusting and overturned, hid in that long grass, one wheel sticking up at an angle.
But on the left side of the porch there was a huge bald patch in the lawn and you could see dirty cellar windows set into the house’s crumbling brick foundation. It was in one of those windows that Eddie Kaspbrak first saw
the face of the leper six weeks ago.
6
On Saturdays, when Eddie could find no one to play with, he often went down to the trainyards. No real reason; he just liked to go out there.
He would ride his bike out Witcham Street and then cut to the northwest along Route 2 where it crossed Witcham. The Neibolt Street Church School stood on the corner of Route 2 and Neibolt Street a mile or so farther on. It was a shabby-neat wood-frame building with a large cross on top and the
words SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME Written
over the front door in gilt letters two feet high. Sometimes, on Saturdays, Eddie heard music and singing coming from inside. It was gospel music,
but whoever was playing the piano sounded more like Jerry Lee Lewis than a regular church piano player. The singing didn’t sound very religious to Eddie, either, although there was lots of stuff in it about “beautiful Zion” and being “washed in the blood of the lamb” and “what a friend we have in Jesus. ” The people singing seemed to be having much too good a time for it to really be sacred singing, in Eddie’s opinion. But he liked the sound of it
all the same—the way he liked to hear Jerry Lee hollering out “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On. ” Sometimes he would stop for awhile across the street, leaning his bike against a tree and pretending to read on the grass, actually jiving along to the music.
Other Saturdays the Church School would be shut up and silent and he would ride out to the trainyard without stopping, out to where Neibolt Street ended in a parking lot with weeds growing up through the cracks in the asphalt. There he would lean his bike against the wooden fence and watch
the trains go by. There were a lot of them on Saturdays. His mother told him that in the old days you could catch a GS&WM passenger train at what was then Neibolt Street Station, but the passenger trains had stopped running around the time the Korean War was starting up. “If you got on the northbound train you went to Brownsville Station, ” she said, “and from
Brownsville you could catch a train that would take you all the way across Canada if you wanted, all the way to the Pacific. The southbound train would take you to Portland and then on down to Boston, and from South Station the country was yours. But the passenger trains have gone the way of the trolley lines now, I guess. No one wants to ride a train when they can just jump in a Ford and go. You may never even ride one. ”
But great long freights still came through Derry. They headed south loaded down with pulpwood, paper, and potatoes, and north with manufactured goods for those towns of what Maine people sometimes called the Big Northern—Bangor, Millinocket, Machias, Presque Isle, Houlton. Eddie particularly liked to watch the northbound car-carriers with their loads of gleaming Fords and Chevies. I’ll have me a car like one of
those someday, he promised himself. Like one of those or even better. Maybe even a Cadillac!
There were six tracks in all, swooping into the station like strands of cobweb tending toward the center: Bangor and Great Northern Lines from the north, the Great Southern and Western Maine from the west, the Boston and Maine from the south, and Southern Seacoast from the east.
One day two years before, when Eddie had been standing near the latter
line and watching a train go through, a drunken trainman had thrown a crate out of a slow-moving boxcar at him. Eddie ducked and flinched backward, although the crate landed in the cinders ten feet away. There were things
inside it, live things that clicked and moved.
“Last run, boy!” the drunken trainman had shouted. He pulled a flat brown bottle from one of the pockets of his denim jacket, tipped it up, drank, then flipped it into the cinders, where it smashed. The trainman pointed at the crate. “Take em home to yer mum! Compliments of the Southern-Fucking-Seacoast-Bound-for-Welfare Line!” He had reeled forward to shout these last words as the train pulled away, gathering speed now, and for one alarming moment Eddie thought he was going to tumble right out.
When the train was gone, Eddie went to the box and bent cautiously over it. He was afraid to get too close. The things inside were slithery and crawly. If the trainman had yelled that they were for him, Eddie would have left them right there. But he had said take em home to your Mom, and, like Ben, when someone said Mom, Eddie jumped.
He scrounged a hank of rope from one of the empty quonset warehouses and tied the crate onto the package carrier of his bike. His mother had peered inside the crate even more warily than Eddie himself, and then she screamed—but with delight rather than terror. There were four lobsters in
the crate, big two-pounders with their claws pegged. She cooked them for supper and had been extremely grumpy with Eddie when he wouldn’t eat any.
“What do you think the Rockefellers are eating this evening at their place in Bar Harbor? ” she asked indignantly. “What do you think the swells are eating at Twenty-one and Sardi’s in New York City? Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? They’re eating lobster, Eddie, same as we are! Now come on
—give it a try. ”
But Eddie wouldn’t—at least that was what his mother said. Maybe it was true, but inside it felt more to Eddie like couldn’t than wouldn’t. He
kept thinking of the way they had slithered inside the crate, and the clicking sounds their claws had made. She kept telling him how delicious they were and what a treat he was missing until he started to gasp for breath and had to use his aspirator. Then she left him alone.
Eddie retreated to his bedroom and read. His mother called up her friend Eleanor Dunton. Eleanor came over and the two of them read old copies of Photoplay and Screen Secrets and giggled over the gossip columns and gorged themselves on cold lobster salad. When Eddie got up for school the next morning, his mother was still in bed, snoring away and letting frequent
farts that sounded like long, mellow cornet notes (she was Getting Off
Some Good Ones, Richie would have said). There was nothing left in the bowl where the lobster salad had been except a few tiny blots of mayonnaise.
That was the last Southern Seacoast train Eddie ever saw, and when he later saw Mr. Braddock, the Derry trainmaster, he asked him hesitantly what had happened. “Cump’ny went broke, ” Mr. Braddock said. “That’s all there was to it. Don’t you read the papers? It’s hap’nin all over the damn country. Now get out of here. This ain’t no place for a kid. ”
After that Eddie would sometimes walk along track 4, which had been the Southern Seacoast track, and listen as a mental conductor chanted
names inside his head, reeling them off in a lovely Downeast monotone, those names, those magic names: Camden, Rockland, Bar Harbor (pronounced Baa Haabaa), Wiscasset, Bath, Portland, Ogunquit, the
Berwicks; he would walk down track 4 heading east until he got tired, and the weeds growing up between the crossties made him feel sad. Once he had looked up and seen seagulls (probably just fat old dump-gulls who didn’t give a shit if they ever saw the ocean, but that had not occurred to him then) wheeling and crying overhead, and the sound of their voices had made him cry a little, too.
There had once been a gate at the entrance to the trainyards, but it had blown over in a windstorm and no one had bothered to replace it. Eddie
came and went pretty much as he liked, although Mr. Braddock would kick him out if he saw him (or any other kid, for that matter). There were truck- drivers who would chase you sometimes (but not very far) because they thought you were hanging around just so you could hawk something—and sometimes kids did.
Mostly, though, the place was quiet. There was a guard-booth but it was empty, its glass windows broken by stones. There had been no full-time security service since 1950 or so. Mr. Braddock shooed the kids away by day and a night-watchman drove through four or five times a night in an old Studebaker with a searchlight mounted outside the vent window and that
was all.
There were tramps and hobos sometimes, though. If anything about the trainyards scared Eddie, they did—men with unshaven cheeks and cracked skin and blisters on their hands and coldsores on their lips. They rode the
rails for awhile and then climbed down for awhile and spent some time in Derry and then got on another train and went somewhere else. Sometimes they had missing fingers. Usually they were drunk and wanted to know if you had a cigarette.
One of these fellows had crawled out from under the porch of the house at 29 Neibolt Street one day and had offered to give Eddie a blowjob for a quarter. Eddie had backed away, his skin like ice, his mouth as dry as lintballs. One of the hobo’s nostrils had been eaten away. You could look right into the red, scabby channel.
“I don’t have a quarter, ” Eddie said, backing toward his bike.
“I’ll do it for a dime, ” the hobo croaked, coming toward him. He was wearing old green flannel pants. Yellow puke was stiffening across the lap. He unzipped his fly and reached inside. He was trying to grin. His nose was a red horror.
“I . . . I don’t have a dime, either, ” Eddie said, and suddenly thought: Oh my God he’s got leprosy! If he touches me I’ll catch it too! His control snapped and he ran. He heard the hobo break into a shuffling run behind him, his old string-tied shoes slapping and flapping across the riotous lawn of the empty saltbox house.
“Come back here, kid! I’ll blow you for free. Come back here!”
Eddie had leaped on his bike, wheezing now, feeling his throat closing up to a pinhole. His chest had taken on weight. He hit the pedals and was just picking up speed when one of the hobo’s hands struck the package carrier.
The bike shimmied. Eddie looked over his shoulder and saw the hobo running along behind the rear wheel (!!GAINING!!), his lips drawn back from the black stumps of his teeth in an expression which might have been either desperation or fury.
In spite of the stones lying on his chest Eddie had pedaled even faster, expecting that one of the hobo’s scab-crusted hands would close over his arm at any moment, pulling him from his Raleigh and dumping him in the ditch, where God knew what would happen to him. He hadn’t dared look around until he had flashed past the Church School and through the Route 2 intersection. The ’bo was gone.
Eddie held this terrible story inside him for almost a week and then confided it to Richie Tozier and Bill Denbrough one day when they were reading comics over the garage.
“He didn’t have leprosy, you dummy, ” Richie said. “He had the Syph. ”
Eddie looked at Bill to see if Richie was ribbing him—he had never heard of a disease called the Sift before. It sounded like something Richie might have made up.
“Is there such a thing as the Sift, Bill? ”
Bill nodded gravely. “Only it’s the Suh-Suh-Syph, not the Sift. It’s s-short for syphilis. ”
“What’s that? ”
“It’s a disease you get from fucking, ” Richie said. “You know about fucking, don’t you, Eds? ”
“Sure, ” Eddie said. He hoped he wasn’t blushing. He knew that when you got older, stuff came out of your penis when it was hard. Vincent
“Boogers” Taliendo had filled him in on the rest one day at school. What you did when you fucked, according to Boogers, was you rubbed your cock against a girl’s stomach until it got hard (your cock, not the girl’s stomach). Then you rubbed some more until you started to “get the feeling. ” When
Eddie asked what that meant, Boogers had only shaken his head in a
mysterious way. Boogers said that you couldn’t describe it, but you’d know it as soon as you got it. He said you could practice by lying in the bathtub and rubbing your cock with Ivory soap (Eddie had tried this, but the only feeling he got was the need to urinate after awhile). Anyway, Boogers went on, after you “got the feeling, ” this stuff came out of your penis. Most kids called it come, Boogers said, but his big brother had told him that the really scientific word for it was jizzum. And when you “got the feeling, ” you had to grab your cock and aim it real fast so you could shoot the jizzum into the girl’s bellybutton as soon as it came out. It went down into her stomach and made a baby there.
Do girls like that? Eddie had asked Boogers Taliendo. He himself was sort of appalled.
I guess they must, Boogers had replied, looking mystified himself.
“Now listen up, Eds, ” Richie said, “because there may be questions later. Some women have got this disease. Some men, too, but mostly it’s women. A guy can get it from a woman—”
“Or another g-g-guy if they’re kwuh-kwuh-queer, ” Bill added.
“Right. The important thing is you get the Syph from screwing someone who’s already got it. ”
“What does it do? ” Eddie asked.
“Makes you rot, ” Richie said simply. Eddie stared at him, horrified.
“It’s bad, I know, but it’s true, ” Richie said. “Your nose is the first thing to go. Some guys with the Syph, their noses fall right off. Then their cocks. ”
“Puh-Puh-Puh-leeze, ” Bill said. “I just a-a-ate. ” “Hey, man, this is science, ” Richie said.
“So what’s the difference between leprosy and the Syph? ” Eddie asked. “You don’t get leprosy from fucking, ” Richie said promptly, and then
went off into a gale of laughter that left both Bill and Eddie mystified.
7
Following that day the house at 29 Neibolt Street 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!”
