THE DERRY PUBLIC LIBRARY-1:55 A.M.

 

being watched.

Mike Hanlon laid his pen aside and looked across the shadowy inverted bowl of the library’s main room. He saw islands of light thrown by the hanging globes; he saw books fading into dimness; he saw the iron staircases making their graceful trellised spirals up to the stacks. He saw nothing out of place.

All the same, he did not believe he was alone in here. Not anymore.

After the others were gone, Mike had cleaned up with a care that was only habit. He was on autopilot, his mind a million miles-and twenty-seven years-away. He dumped ashtrays, threw away the empty liquor bottles (putting a layer of waste over them so that Carole wouldn’t be shocked), and the returnable cans in a box behind his desk. Then he got the broom and swept up the remains of the gin bottle Eddie had broken.

When the table was clean, he had gone into the Periodicals Room and picked up the scattered magazines. As he did these simple chores, his mind sifted the stories they had told-concentrating the most, perhaps, on what they had left out. They believed they remembered everything; he thought that Bill and Beverly almost did. But there was more. It would come to them… if it allowed them the time. In 1958, there had been no chance for preparation. They had talked endlessly-their talk interrupted only by the rockfight and that one act of group heroism at 29 Neibolt Street-and might, in the end, have done no more than talk. Then August 14th had come, and Henry and his friends had simply chased them into the sewers.

Maybe I should have told them, he thought, putting the last of the magazines back in their places. But something spoke strongly against the idea-the voice of the Turtle, he supposed. Perhaps that was part of it, and perhaps that sense of circularity was part of it, too. Maybe that last act was going to repeat itself, in some updated fashion, as well. He had put flashlights and miner’s helmets carefully by against tomorrow; he had the blueprints of the Derry sewer and drain systems neatly rolled up and held with rubber bands in that same closet. But, when they were kids, all their talk and all their plans, half-baked or otherwise, had come to nothing in the end; in the end they had simply been chased into the drains, hurled into the confrontation which had followed. Was that going to happen again? Faith and power, he had come to believe, were interchangeable. Was the final truth even simpler? That no act of faith was possible until you were rudly pushed out into the screaming middle of things like a newborn child skydiving chutelessly out of his mother’s womb? Once you were falling, you were forced to believe in the chute, into existence, weren’t you? Pulling the ring as you fell became your final statement on the subject, one way or the other.

Jesus Christ, it’s Fulton Sheen in blackface, Mike thought, and laughed a little.

Mike cleaned, neatened, thought his thoughts, while another part of his brain expected that he would finish and finally find himself tired enough to go home and sleep for a few hours. But when he finally did finish, he found himself as wide awake as ever. So he had gone to the single closed stack behind his office, unlocking the wire gate with a key from his ring and letting himself in. This stack, supposedly fireproof when the vault-type door was closed and locked, contained the library’s valuable first editions, books signed by writers long since dead (among the signed editions were Moby Dick and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass), historical matter relating to the town, and the personal papers of the few writers who had lived and worked in Derry. Mike hoped, if all of this ended well, to persuade Bill to leave his manuscripts to the Derry Public library. Walking down the third aisle of the stack beneath tin-shaded light-bulbs, smelling the familiar library scents of must and dust and cinnimony, ageing paper, he thought: When I die, I guess I’ll go with a library card in one hand and an OVERDUE stamp in the other. Well, maybe that’s better than dying with a gun in your hand, nigger.

He stopped halfway down this third aisle. His dog-eared steno notebook, which contained the jotted tales of Derry and his own troubled wanderings, was tucked between Fricke’s Old Derry-Town and Michaud’s History of Derry. He had pushed the notebook so far back it was nearly invisible. No one would stumble across it unless they were looking for it.

Mike took it and went back to the table where they had held their meeting, pausing to turn off the lights in the closed stack and to re-lock the wire mesh. He sat down and flipped through the pages he had written, thinking what a strange, crippled affidavit he had created: half-history, half-scandal, part diary, part confessional. He had not entered since April 6th. Have to get a new book soon, he thought, thumbing the few blank pages that were left. He thought bemusedly for a moment of Margaret Mitchell’s first draft of Gone with the Wind, written in longhand in stacks and stacks and stacks of school composition books. Then he uncapped his pen and wrote May 31st two lines below the end of his last entry. He paused, looking vaguely across the empty library, and then began to write about everything that had happened during the last three days, beginning with his telephone call to Stanley Uris.

He wrote carefully for fifteen minutes, and then his concentration began to come unravelled. He paused more and more frequently. The image of Stan Uris’s severed head in the refrigerator tried to intrude, Stan’s bloody head, the mouth open and full of feathers, falling out of the refrigerator and rolling across the floor toward him. He banished it with an effort and went on writing. Five minutes later he jerked upright and whirled around, convinced he would see that head rolling across the old black and red tiles of the main floor, eyes as glassy and avid as the eyes in the mounted head of a deer. There was nothing. No head, no sound except the muffled drum of his own heart.

Got to get ahold of yourself, Mikey. It’s the jim-jams, that’s all. Nothing else to it.

But it was no use. The words began to get away from him, the thoughts seemed to dangle just out of reach. There was a pressure on the back of his neck, and it seemed to grow heavier.

Being watched.

He put his pen down and got up from the table. “Is anyone here?” he called, and his voice echoed back from the rotunda, giving him a jolt. He licked his lips and tried again. “Bill?… Ben?”

Bill-ill-ill… Ben-en-en…

Suddenly Mike decided he wanted to be home. He would simply take the notebook with him. He reached for it… and heard a faint sliding footstep.

He looked up again. Pools of light surrounded by deepening lagoons of shadow. Nothing else… at least nothing he could see. He waited, heart beating hard.

The footstep came again, and this time he pinpointed the location. The glassed-in passageway that connected the adult library to the Children’s Library. In there. Someone. Something.

Moving quietly, Mike walked across to the checkout desk. The double doors leading into the passageway were held open by wooden chocks, and he could see a little way in. He could see what looked like feet, and with sudden swooning horror he wondered if maybe Stan had come after all, if maybe Stan was going to step out of the shadows with his bird encyclopedia in one hand, his face white, his lips purple, his wrists and forearms cut open. I finally came, Stan would say. It took me awhile because I had to pull myself out of a hole in the ground, but I finally came…

There was another footstep and now Mike could see shoes for sure-shoes and ragged pantslegs-denim, with strings hanging down against sockless ankles. And, in the darkness almost six feet above those ankles, he could see glittering eyes.

He groped over the surface of the semicircular checkout desk and felt along the other side without taking his gaze from those moveless, glittering eyes. His fingers felt one wooden corner of a small box-the overdue cards. A paper box-paper clips and rubber bands. They happened on something that was metal and seized it. It was a letter-opener with the words JESUS SAVES stamped on the handle. A flimsy thing that had come in the mail from the Grace Baptist Church as part of a fund-raising drive. Mike had not attended services in fifteen years, but Grace Baptist had been his mother’s church and he had sent them five dollars he could not really afford. He had meant to throw the letter-opener out but it had stayed here, amid the clutter on his side of the desk (Carole’s side was always spotlessly clean) until now.

He clutched it with feverish strength and stared into the shadowy hallway.

There was another step… another. Now the ragged denim pants were visible up to the knees. He could see the shape these lower legs belonged to: it was big, hulking. The shoulders were rounded. There was a suggestion of ragged hair. The figure was ape-like.

“Who are you?”

There was no answer. The shape merely stood there, contemplating him.

Although still afraid, Mike had gotten over the debilitating idea that it might be Stan Uris, returned from the grave, called back by the scars on his palms, some eldritch magnetism which had brought him back like a zombie in a Hammer horror film. Whoever this was, it wasn’t Stan Uris, who had finished at five-seven when he had his full growth.

The shape took another step, and now the light from the globe closest to the passageway fell across the beltless loops of the jeans around the shape’s waist.

Suddenly Mike knew. Even before the shape spoke, he knew.

“Why, it’s the nigger,” the shape said. “Been throwing rocks at anyone, nigger? Want to know who poisoned your fucking dog?”

The shape stepped forward. The light fell on the face of Henry Bowers. It had grown fat and sagging; the skin had an unhealthy tallowy hue; the cheeks had become hanging jowls that were specked with stubble, almost as much white in that stubble as black. Wavy lines-three of them-were engraved in the shelf of the forehead above the bushy brows. Other lines formed parentheses at the corners of the full-lipped mouth. The eyes were small and mean inside discolored pouches of flesh-bloodshot and thoughtless. It was the face of a man being pushed into a premature age, a man who was thirty-nine going on seventy-three. But it was also the face of a twelve-year-old boy. Henry’s clothes were still green with whatever bushes he had spent the day hiding in.

“Ain’t you ganna say howdy, nigger?” Henry asked.

“Hellow, Henry.” It occurred to him dimly that he had not listened to the radio for the last two days, and he had not even read the paper, which was a ritual with him. Too much going on. Too busy.

Too bad.

Henry emerged from the corridor between the Children’s Library and the adult library and stood there, peering at Mike with his piggy little eyes. His lips parted in an unspeakable grin, revealing rotted back-Maine teeth.

“Voices,” he said. “You hear voices, nigger?”

“Which voices are those, Henry?” He put both hands behind his back, like a schoolboy called upon to recite, and transferred the letter-opener from his left hand to his right. The grandfather clock, given by Horst Mueller in 1923, ticked solemn seconds into the smooth pond of library silence.

“From the moon,” Henry said. He put a hand in his pocket. “Came from the moon. Lots of voices.” He paused, frowned slightly, then shook his head. “Lots but really only one. It’s voice.”

“Did you see It, Henry?”

“Yep,” Henry said. “Frankenstein. Tore off Victor’s head. You should have heard it. Made a sound like a great big zipper going down. Then It went after Belch. Belch fought It.”

“Did he?”

“Yep. That’s how I got away.”

“You left him to die.”

“Don’t you say that!” Henry’s cheeks flushed a dull red. He took two steps forward. The farther he walked from the umbilicus connecting the Children’s Library to the adult library, the younger he looked to Mike. He saw the same old meanness in Henry’s face, but he saw something else as well: the child who had been brought up by crazy Butch Bowers on a good farm that had gone to shitshack shambles over the years. “don’t you say that! It would have killed me, too.”

“It didn’t kill us.”

Henry’s eyes gleamed with rancid humor. “Not yet. But It will. “Less I don’t leave any of you for It to get,” He pulled his hand out of his pocket. In it was a slim nine-inch-long instrument with imitation-ivory inlay along its sides. A small chromium button glittered at one end of this dubious objet d’art. Henry pushed it. A six-inch steel blade popped out of the slit at the end of the handle. He bounced the switchblade on his palm and began to walk toward the checkout desk a little faster.

“Look what I found,” he said. “I knew where to look.” Obscenely, one red-rimmed eyelid drooped in a wink. “The man in the moon told me.” Henry revealed his teeth again. “Hid today. Hitchhiked a ride tonight. Old man. Hit him. Killed him, I think. Ditched the car over in Newport. Just over the Derry town line, I heard that voice. I looked in a drain. There was these clothes. And the knife. My old knife.”

“You’re forgetting something, Henry.”

Henry, grinning, only shook his head.

“We got away and you got away. If It wants us, It wants you too.”

“No.”

“I think yes. Maybe you yo-yos did Its work, but It didn’t exactly play favorites, did It? It got both of your friends, and while Belch was fighting It, you got away. But now you’re back. I think you’re part of Its unfinished business, Henry. I really do.”

“No!”

“Maybe Frankenstein’s what you’ll see. Or the Werewolf? A Vampire. The Clown, Or Henry! Maybe you’ll really see what It looks like, Henry. We did. Want me to tell you? Want me to-”

“You shut up!” Henry screamed, and launched himself at Mike.

Mike stepped aside and stuck out one foot. Henry tripped over it and went skidding over the footworn tiles like a shuffleboard weight. His head struck a leg of the table where the Losers had sat earlier that night, telling their tales. For a moment he was stunned; the knife hung loose in his hand.

Mike went after him, went after the knife. In that moment he could have finished Henry; it would have been possible to have planted the JESUS SAVES letter-opener which had come in the mail from his mother’s old church in the back of Henry’s neck and then called the police. There would have been a certain amount of official nonsense, but not too much of it-not in Derry, where such weird and violent events were not entirely exceptional.

What stopped him was a realization, almost too lightninglike to be conscious, that if he killed Henry, he would be doing Its work as surely as Henry would be doing Its work by killing Mike. And something else; that other look he had seen on Henry’s face, the tired, bewildered look of the badly used child who has been set on a poisonous path for some unknown purpose. Henry had grown up within the contaminated radius of Butch Bowers’s mind; surely he had belonged to It even before he suspected it existed.

So instead of planting the letter-opener in Henry’s vulnerable neck, he dropped to his knees and snatched at the knife. It twisted in his hand-seemingly of its own volition-and his ringers closed on the blade. There was no immediate pain; only red blood flowing down the first three fingers of his right hand and into his scarred palm.

He pulled back. Henry rolled away and grabbed the knife again. Mike got to his knees and the two of them faced each other that way, each bleeding: Mike’s fingers, Henry’s nose. Henry shook his head and droplets flew away into the darkness.

“Thought you were so smart!” he cried hoarsely. “Fucking sissies is all you were! We could have beat you in a fair fight!”

“Put the knife down, Henry,” Mike said quietly. “I’ll call the police. They’ll come and get you and take you back to Juniper Hill. You’ll be out of Derry. You’ll be safe.”

Henry tried to talk and couldn’t. He couldn’t tell this hateful jig that he wouldn’t be safe in Juniper Hill, or Los Angeles, or the rainforests of Timbuktu. Sooner or later the moon would rise, bone-white and snow-cold, and the ghost-voices would start, and the face of the moon would change into Its face, babbling and laughing and ordering. He swallowed slick-slimy blood.

“You never fought fair!”

“Did you?” Mike asked.

“You niggerboogienight-fighterjungle-bunnyapemancoon!” Henry screamed, and leaped at Mike again.

Mike leaned back to avoid his blundering, awkward rush, overbalanced, and went sprawling on his back. Henry struck the table again, rebounded, turned, and clutched Mike’s arm. Mike swept the letter-opener around and felt it go deep into Henry’s forearm. Henry screamed, but instead of letting go, he tightened his grip. He pulled himself toward Mike, his hair in his eyes, blood flowing from his ruptured nose over his thick lips.

Mike tried to get a foot in Henry’s side and push him away. Henry swung the switchblade in a glittering arc, and all six inches of it went into Mike’s thigh. It went in effortlessly, as if into a warm cake of butter. Henry pulled it out, dripping, and with a scream of combined pain and effort, Mike shoved him away.

He struggled to his feet but Henry was up more quickly, and Mike was barely able to avoid Henry’s next blundering rush. He could feel blood pouring down his leg in an alarming flood, filling his loafer. He got my femoral artery, I think. Jesus, he got me bad. Blood everywhere. Blood on the floor. Shoes won’t be any good, shit, just bought them two months ago-

Henry came again, panting and puffing like a bull in heat. Mike staggered aside and swept the letter-opener at him again. It tore through Henry’s ragged shirt and pulled a deep cut across his ribs. Henry grunted as Mike shoved him away again.

“You dirty-fighting nigger!” He wailed. “Look what you done!”

“Drop the knife, Henry,” Mike said.

There was a titter from behind them. Henry looked… and then screamed in utter horror, clapping his hands to his cheeks like an offended old maid. Mike’s gaze jerked toward the circulation desk. There was a loud, vibrating ka-spanggg! sound, and Stan Uris’s head popped up from behind the desk. A spring corkscrewed up and into his severed, dripping neck. His face was livid with greasepaint. There was a fever spot of rouge on each cheek. Great orange pompoms flowered where the eyes had been. This grotesque Stan-in-the-box head nodded back and forth at the end of its spring like one of the giant sunflowers beside the house on Neibolt Street. Its mouth opened and a squealing, laughing voice began to chant: “Kill him, Henry! Kill the nigger, kill the coon, kill him, kill him, KILL HIM!”

Mike wheeled back toward Henry, dismally aware that he had been tricked, wondering faintly whose face Henry had seen at the end of that spring. Stan’s? Victor Criss’s? His father’s, perhaps?

Henry shrieked and rushed at Mike, the switchblade plunging up and down like the needle of a sewing machine. “Gaaaah, nigger!” Henry was screaming. “Gaaaah, nigger! Gaaaah, nigger!”

Mike back-pedaled, and the leg Henry had stabbed buckled under him almost at once, spilling him to the floor. There was hardly any feeling at all left in that leg. It felt cold and distant. Looking down, he saw that his cream-colored slacks were now bright red.

Henry’s blade flashed by in front of his nose.

Mike stabbed out with the JESUS SAVES letter-opener as Henry turned back for another go. Henry ran into it like a bug onto a phi. Warm blood doused Mike’s hand. There was a snap, and when he drew his hand back, he only had the haft of the letter-opener. The blade was in Henry’s stomach.

“Gaaah! Nigger!” Henry screamed, clapping a hand over the protruding jag of blade. Blood poured through his fingers. He looked at it with bulging, unbelieving eyes. The head of the end of the creaking, dipping jack-in-the-box squealed and laughed. Mike, feeling sick and dizzy now, looked back at it and saw Belch Huggin’s head, a human champagne cork wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap turned backward. He groaned aloud, and the sound was far away, echoey, in his own ears. He was aware that he was sitting in a pool of warm blood… his own. If I don’t get a tourniquet on my leg, I’m going to die.

“Gaaaaaaaaaah! Neeeeeeegaaaa!” Henry screamed. Still holding his bleeding belly with one hand and the switchblade with the other, he staggered away from Mike and toward the library doors. He wove drunkenly from side to side, progressing across the echoing main room like a pinball in an electronic game. He struck one of the easy-chairs and knocked it over. His groping hand spilled a rack of newspapers onto the floor. He reached the doors, straight-armed one of them; and plunged out into the night.

Mike’s consciousness was fading now. He worked at the buckle of his belt with fingers he could barely feel. At last he got it unhooked and managed to pull it free of its loops. He put it around his bleeding leg just below the groin and cinched it tight. Holding it with one hand, he began to crawl toward the circulation desk. The phone was there. He wasn’t sure how he was going to reach it, but for now that didn’t matter. The trick was just to get there. The world wavered, blurred, grew faint behind waves of gray. He stuck his tongue out and bit down on it savagely. The pain was immediate and exquisite. The world swam back into focus. He became aware that he was still holding the ragged haft of the letter-opener, and he tossed it away. Here, at last, was the circulation desk, looking as tall as Everest.

Mike got his good leg under him and pushed himself up, clutching at the edge of the desk with the hand that wasn’t holding the belt tight. His mouth was drawn down in a trembling grimace, his eyes slitted. At last he managed to get all the way up. He stood there, storklike, and groped the telephone over to him. Taped to the side were three numbers: fire, police, and hospital. With one shaking finger that looked at least ten miles away, Mike dialed the hospital: 555-3711. He closed his eyes as the phone began to ring… and then they opened wide as the voice of Pennywise the Clown answered.

“Howdy nigger!” Pennywise cried, and then screamed laughter as sharp as broken glass into Mike’s ear. “What do you say? How you doon? I think you’re dead, what do you think? I think Henry did the job on you! Want a balloon, Mikey? Want a balloon? How you doon? Hello there!”

Mike’s eyes turned up to the face of the grandfather clock, the Mueller Clock, it was called, and saw with no surprise at ail that the clockface had been replaced with his father’s face, gray and raddled with cancer. The eyes were turned up to show only bulging whites. Suddenly his father popped his tongue out and the clock began to strike.

Mike lost his grip on the circulation desk. He swayed for a moment on his good leg and then he fell down again. The phone swung before him at the end of its cord like a mesmerist’s amulet. It was becoming very hard to hold onto the belt now.

“Hello dere Amos!” Pennywise cried brightly from the swinging telephone handset. “dis here’s de Kingfish! I is de Kingish in Derry anyhow, and dat’s de troof. Wouldn’t you say so, boy?”

“If there’s anyone there,” Mike croaked, “a real voice behind the one I am hearing, please help me. My name is Michael Hanlon and I’m at the Derry Public Library. I am bleeding to death. If you’re there, I can’t hear you. I’m not being allowed to hear you. If you’re there, please hurry.”

He lay on his side, drawing his legs up until he was in a fetal position. He took two turns around his right hand with the belt and concentrated on holding it as the world drifted away in those cottony, balloon-like clouds of gray.

“Hello dere, howyadoon?” Pennywise screamed from the dangling, swinging phone. “Howyadoon, you dirty coon? Hello

 

4

KANSAS STREET / 12:20 P.M.

 

–… there,” Henry Bowers said. “Howyadoon, you little cunt?”

Beverly reacted instantly, turning to run. It was a quicker reaction than any of them had expected, and she might actually have gotten a running start… but for her hair. Henry snatched at it, caught part of its long flow, and pulled her back. He grinned into her face. His breath was thick and warm and stinking.

“Howyadoon?” Henry Bowers asked her. “Where ya goin? Back to play with your asshole friends some more? I think I’ll cut off your nose and make you eat it. You like that?”

She struggled to get free. Henry laughed and shook her head back and forth by the hair. The knife flashed dangerously in the hazy August sunshine.

Abruptly a car-horn honked-a long blast.

“Here! Here! What are you boys doing? Let that girl go!”

It was an old lady behind the wheel of a well-preserved 1950 Ford. She had pulled up to the curb and was leaning across the blanket-covered seat to peer out the passenger-side window. At the sight of her angry, honest face, the blank, dazed look left Victor Criss’s eyes for the first time and he looked nervously at Henry. “What-”

“Please!” Bev cried shrilly. “He’s got a knife! A knife!”

The old lady’s anger now became concern, surprise, and fear as well. “What are you boys doing? Let her alone!”

Across the street-Bev saw this quite clearly-Herbert Ross got out of the lawn-chair on his porch, approached the porch rail, and looked over. His face was as blank as Belch Huggins’s. He folded his paper, turned, and went quietly into the house.

“Let her be!” the old lady cried shrilly.

Henry bared his teeth and suddenly ran at her car, dragging Beverly after him by the hair. She stumbled, went to one knee, was dragged. The pain in her scalp was excruciating, monstrous. She felt some of her hair rip out.

The old lady screamed and cranked the passenger side window frantically. Henry, still roaring, stabbed down, and the switchblade skated across glass. The woman’s foot came off the old Ford’s clutch-pedal and it went down Kansas Street in three big jerks, bouncing up over the curb, where it stalled. Henry went after it, still pulling Beverly along. Victor licked his lips and looked around. Belch pushed the New York Yankees baseball cap he was wearing up on his forehead and then dug at his ear in a puzzled gesture.

Bev saw the old woman’s white, frightened face for one moment, and then saw her pawing at the door-locks, first on the passenger side, then on her own. The Ford’s engine ground and caught. Henry lifted one booted foot and kicked out a taillight.

“Get outta here, you dried-up old bitch!”

The tires screamed as the old lady pulled back out in the street. An oncoming pickup truck swerved to avoid her; its horn blasted. Henry turned back toward Bev, beginning to smile again, and she hiked one sneakered foot directly into his balls.

The smile on Henry’s face turned into a grimace of agony. The switchknife dropped from his hand and clattered onto the sidewalk. His other hand left its nesting-place in the tangle of her hair (pulling once more, terribly, as it went) and then he sank to his knees, trying to scream, holding his crotch. She could see strands of her own coppery hair on one hand, and in that instant all of her terror turned to bright hate. She drew in a great, hitching breath and hocked a remarkably large looey onto the top of his head.

Then she turned and ran.

Belch lumbered three steps after her and then stopped. He and Victor went to Henry, who threw them aside and then staggered to his feet, both hands still cupping his balls; it was not the first time that summer that he had been kicked there.

He leaned over and picked up the switchblade.”… on,” he wheezed.

“What, Henry?” Belch said anxiously.

Henry turned a face toward him that was so full of sweating pain and sick, blazing hate that Belch fell back a step. “I said… come… on!” he managed, and began to stagger and lurch up the street after Beverly, holding his crotch.

“We can’t catch her now, Henry,” Victor said uneasily. “Hell, you can hardly walk.”

“We’ll catch her,” Henry panted. His upper lip was rising and falling in an unconscious dog-like sneer. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and ran down his hectic cheeks. “We’ll catch her, all right. Because I know where she’s going. She’s going down into the Barrens to be with her asshole

 

5

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