SPECIAL GUEST VOCLAIST JIM MORRISON

WELCOME HOME RICHIE!

YOU’RE DEAD TOO!

He felt as if someone had whopped all the breath out of him… and then he heard that sound again, that sound that was half pressure on the skin and eardrums, that keen homicidal whispering rush-Swiipppp! He rolled off the bench onto the gravel, thinking So this is what they mean by deja vu, now you know, you’ll never have to ask anybody again-

He hit on his shoulder and rolled, looking up at the Paul Bunyan statue-only it was no longer Paul Bunyan. The clown stood there instead, resplendent and evident, fantastic in plastic, twenty feet of Day-Glo colors, its painted face surmounting a cosmic comic ruff. Orange pompom buttons cast in plastic, each as big as a volleyball, ran down the front of the silvery suit. Instead of an axe it held a huge bunch of plastic balloons. Engraved on each were two legends: IT’S STILL ROCK AND ROLL TO ME and RICHIE TOZIER’S “ALL-DEAD” ROCK SHOW.

He scrambled backward, using his heels and his palms. Gravel went down the back of his pants. He heard a seam tear loose in die underarm of his Rodeo Drive sportcoat. He rolled over, gamed his feet, staggered, looked back. The down looked down at him. Its eyes rolled wetly in their sockets.

“Did I give you a scare, m’man?” it rumbled.

And Richie heard his mouth say, quite independently of his frozen brain: “Cheap thrills in the back of my car, Bozo. That’s all.”

The clown grinned and nodded as if it had expected no more. Red paint-bleeding lips parted to show teeth like fangs, each one coming to a razor point. “I could have you now if I wanted you now,” it said. “But this is going to be too much fun.”

“Fun for me too,” Richie heard his mouth say. “The most fun of all when we come to take your fucking head off, baby.”

The clown’s grin spread wider and wider. It raised one hand, clad in a white glove, and Richie felt the wind of the movement blow the hair off his forehead as it had on that day twenty-seven years ago. The clown’s index finger popped out at him. It was as big as a beam.

Big as a bea-, Richie thought, and then the pain struck again. It drove nisty spikes into the soft jelly of his eyes. He screamed and clutched at his face.

“Before removing the mote from thy neighbor’s eye, attend the beam in thine own,” the clown intoned, its words rumbling and vibrating, and Richie was again enveloped in the sweet stink of its carrion breath.

He looked up, and took half a dozen hurried steps backward. The clown was bending down, its gloved hands on its gaily pantalooned knees.

“Want to play some more, Richie? How about if I point at your pecker and give you prostate cancer? Or I could point at your head and give you a good old brain tumor-although I’m sure some people would say that would only be adding to what was already there. I can point at your mouth and your stupid flapping tongue will turn into so much running pus. I can do it, Richie. Want to see?”

Its eyes were widening, widening, and in those black pupils, each as big as a softball, Richie saw the mad darkness that must exist over the rim of the universe; he saw a shitty happiness that he felt would drive him insane. In that moment he understood It could do any of these things and more.

And yet again he heard his mouth, but this time it was not his voice, or any of his created Voices, past or present; it was a Voice he had never heard before. Later he would tell the others, hesitantly, that it was a kind of Mr Jiveass Nigger Voice, loud and proud, self-parodying and screechy. “Git off man case you big ole honky clown!” he shouted, and suddenly he was laughing again. “No shit an no shine, muhfuh! I got d’walk, I got d’talk, and I got d’big boppin cock! I got d” “time, I got d” “mine, I’m a man wit” a plan an if you doan shit, you goan git! You hear me, you whiteface bunghole?”

Richie thought the clown recoiled, but he did not stick around to find out for sure. He ran, elbows pumping, sportcoat flying out in wings behind him, not caring that a father who had stopped so his toddler could admire Paul was now staring warily at him, as if he had gone crazy. As a matter of fact, folks, Richie thought, I feel like I’ve gone crazy. Oh God do I ever. And that had to have been the shiniest Grandmaster Flash imitation in history but somehow it did the trick, somehow-

And then the clown’s voice thundered after him. The father of the little boy did not hear it, but the toddler’s face suddenly pinched in upon itself and he began to wail. The dad picked his son up and hugged him, bewildered. Even through his own terror, Richie observed this little sideshow closely. The voice of the clown was perhaps angrily gleeful, perhaps just angry: “We’ve got the eye down here, Richie… you hear me? The one that crawls. If you don’t want to fly, don’t wanna say goodbye, you come on down under this here town and give a great big hi to one great big eye! You come down and see it anytime. Just any old time you like. You hear me, Richie? Bring your yo-yo. Have Beverly wear a big full skin with four or five petticoats underneath. Have her wear her husband’s ring around her neck! Get Eddie to wear his saddle-shoes! We’ll play some bop, Richie! We’ll play AAALLLL THE HITS!”

Reaching the sidewalk, Richie dared to look back over his shoulder, and what he saw was in no way comforting. Paul Bunyan was still gone, and now the clown was gone, too. Where they had stood there was now a twenty-foot-high plastic statue of Buddy Holly. He was wearing a button on one of the narrow lapels of his plaid sportcoat. RICHIE TOZIER’s “ALL-DEAD” ROCK SHOW, the button read.

One bow of Buddy’s glasses had been mended with adhesive tape.

The little boy was still crying hysterically; his father was walking rapidly back toward downtown with the weeping child in his arms. He gave Richie a wide berth.

Richie got walking

(feets don’t fail me now)

trying not to think about

(we’ll play AAALLLL THE HITS!)

what had just happened. All he wanted to think about was the monster jolt of Scotch he was going to have in the Derry Town House bar before he went up to take that nap.

The thought of a drink-just your ordinary garden-variety drink-made him feel a little better. He looked over his shoulder one more time and the fact that Paul Bunyan was back, grinning at the sky, plastic axe over his shoulder, made him feel better still. Richie began to walk faster, making tracks, putting distance between himself and that statue. He had even begun to think about the possibility of hallucinations when the pain struck his eyes again, deep and agonizing, causing him to cry out hoarsely. A pretty young girl who had been walking ahead of him, looking dreamily up at the breaking clouds, looked back at him, hesitated, then hurried over.

“Mister, are you all right?”

“It’s my contacts,” he said in a strained voice. “My damned contact le-oh my God that hurts!”

This time he got his forefingers up so quickly he almost jabbed them into his eyes. He pulled down the lower lids and thought, I won’t be able to blink them out, that’s what’s going to happen, I won’t be able to blink them out and it’s just going to go on hurting and hurting and hurting until I go blind go blind go bl-But one blink did it as one blink always had. The sharp and denned world, where colors stayed inside the lines and where faces that you saw were clear and obvious, simply fell away. Wide bands of pastel fuzz took their place. And although he and the high-school girl, who was both helpful and concerned, searched the paving of the sidewalk for almost fifteen minutes, neither could find even a single lens.

In the back of his head Richie seemed to hear the clown laughing.

 

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