It Read online

  "Do a-a-any of y-y-y-you rem-m-member what It really w-w-was?"

  "No," Eddie said.

  "I think . . ." Richie began, and then Bill could almost feel him shake his head in the dark. "No."

  "No," Beverly said.

  "Huh-uh." That was Ben. "That's the one thing I still can't remember. What It was . . . or how we fought It."

  "Chud," Beverly said. "That's how we fought it. But I don't remember what that means."

  "Stand by m-me," Bill said, "and I-I'll stuh-stuh-hand by y-y-you guys."

  "Bill," Ben said. His voice was very calm. "Something is coming. "

  Bill listened. He heard dragging, shambling footsteps approaching them in the dark ... and he was afraid.

  "A-A-Audra?" he called ... and knew already that it was not her.

  Whatever was shambling toward them drew closer.

  Bill struck a light.

  8

  Derry/5:00 A.M.

  The first wrong thing happened on that late-spring day in 1985 two minutes before official sunrise. To understand how wrong it was one would have to have known two facts that were known to Mike Hanlon (who lay unconscious in the Derry Home Hospital as the sun came up), both concerning the Grace Baptist Church, which had stood on the corner of Witcham and Jackson since 1897. The church was topped with a slender white spire which was the apotheosis of every Protestant church-steeple in New England. There were clock-faces on all four sides of the steeple-base, and the clock itself had been constructed and shipped from Switzerland in the year 1898. The only one like it stood in the town square of Haven Village, forty miles away.

  Stephen Bowie, a timber baron who lived on West Broadway, donated the clock to the town at a cost of some $17,000. Bowie could afford it. He was a devout churchgoer and deacon for forty years (during several of those later years he was also president of Derry's Legion of White Decency chapter). In addition, he was known for his devout layman sermons on Mother's Day, which he always referred to reverently as Mother's Sunday.

  From the time of its installation until May 31st, 1985, that clock had faithfully chimed each hour and each half--with one notable exception. On the day of the explosion at the Kitchener Ironworks it had not chimed the noon-hour. Residents believed that the Reverend Jollyn had silenced the clock to show that the church was in mourning for the dead children, and Jollyn never disabused them of this notion although it was not true. The clock had simply not chimed.

  Nor did it chime the hour of five on the morning of May 31st, 1985.

  At that moment, all over Derry, old-timers opened their eyes and sat up, disturbed for no reason they could put their fingers on. Medicines were gulped, false teeth put in, pipes and cigars lit.

  The old folks stood a watch.

  One of them was Norbert Keene, now in his nineties. He hobbled to the window and looked out at a darkening sky. The weather report the night before had called for clear skies, but his bones told him it was going to rain, and hard. He felt scared, deep inside him; in some obscure way he felt threatened, as if a poison were working its way relentlessly toward his heart. He thought randomly of the day the Bradley Gang had ridden heedlessly into Derry, into the sights of seventy-five pistols and rifles. That kind of work left a man feeling kind of warm and lazy inside, like everything was ... was somehow confirmed. He couldn't put it any better than that, even to himself. Work like that left a man feeling like he maybe might live forever, and Norbert Keene damn near had. Ninety-six years old come June 24th, and he still walked three miles every day. But now he felt scared.

  "Those kids," he said, looking out his window, unaware he had spoken. "What is it with them damn kids? What they monkeying around with this time?"

  Egbert Thoroughgood, ninety-nine, who had been in the Silver Dollar when Claude Heroux tuned up his axe and played "The Dead March" for four men on it, awoke at the same moment, sat up, and let out a rusty scream that no one heard. He had dreamed of Claude, only Claude had been coming after him, and the axe had come down, and a moment after it did Thoroughgood had seen his own severed hand twitching and curling on the counter.

  Something wrong, he thought in his muddy way, frightened and shaking all over in his pee-stained longjohns. Something dreadful wrong.

  Dave Gardener, who had discovered George Denbrough's mutilated body in October of 1957 and whose son had discovered the first victim of this new cycle earlier in the spring, opened his eyes on the stroke of five and thought, even before looking at the clock on the bureau: Grace Church clock didn't chime the hour.... What's wrong? He felt a large ill-defined fright. Dave had prospered over the years; in 1965 he had purchased The Shoeboat, and now there was a second Shoeboat at the Derry Mall and a third up in Bangor. Suddenly all of those things--things he had spent his life working for--seemed in jeopardy. From what? he cried to himself, looking at his sleeping wife. From what, why you so goddam antsy just because that clock didn't chime? But there was no answer.

  He got up and went to the window, hitching at the waistband of his pajamas. The sky was restless with clouds racing in from the west, and Dave's disquiet grew. For the first time in a very long while he found himself thinking of the screams that had brought him to his porch twenty-seven years ago, to see that writhing figure in the yellow rainslicker. He looked at the approaching clouds and thought: We're in danger. All of us. Derry.

  Chief Andrew Rademacher, who really believed he had tried his best to solve the new string of child-murders that had plagued Derry, stood on the porch of his house, thumbs in his Sam Browne belt, looking up at the clouds, and felt the same disquiet. Something getting ready to happen. Looks like it's going to pour buckets, for one thing. But that's not all. He shuddered... and as he stood there on his porch, the smell of the bacon his wife was cooking wafting out through the screen door, the first dime-sized drops of rain darkened the sidewalk in front of his pleasant Reynolds Street home and, somewhere just over the horizon from Bassey Park, thunder rumbled.

  Rademacher shivered again.

  9

  Georgel5:01 A.M.

  Bill held the match up ... and uttered a long trembling despairing screech.

  It was George wavering up the tunnel toward him, George, still dressed in his blood-spattered yellow rainslicker. One sleeve dangled limp and useless. George's face was white as cheese and his eyes were shiny silver. They fixed on Bill's own.

  "My boat!" Georgie's lost voice rose, wavering, in the tunnel. "I can't find it, Bill, I've looked everywhere and I can't find it and now I'm dead and it's your fault your fault YOUR FAULT--"

  "Juh-Juh-Georgie!" Bill shrieked. He felt his mind tottering, ripping free of its moorings.

  George stumble-staggered toward him and now his one remaining arm rose toward Bill, the white hand at the end of it hooked into a claw. The nails were dirty and grasping.

  "Your fault," George whispered, and grinned. His teeth were fangs; they opened and closed slowly, like the teeth in a beartrap. "You sent me out and it's all . . . your . . . fault."

  "Nuh-Nuh-No, Juh Juh-Georgie!" Bill cried. "I dih-dihdidn' t nuh-hun-nuhknow--"

  "Kill you!" George cried, and a mixture of doglike sounds came out of that fanged mouth: yips, yelps, howls. A kind of laughter. Bill could smell him now, could smell George rotting. It was a cellar-smell, squirmy, the smell of some final monster standing slumped and yellow-eyed in the corner, waiting to unzip some small boy's guts.

  George's teeth gnashed together. The sound was like billiard balls clicking off one another. Yellow pus began to leak from his eyes and dribble down his face ... and the match went out.

  Bill felt his friends disappear--they were running, of course they were, they were leaving him alone. They were cutting him off, as his parents had cut him off, because George was right: it was all his fault. Soon he would feel that single hand seize his throat, soon he would feel those fangs pulling him open, and that would be right. That would be only just. He had sent George out to die, and he had spent his whole adult life writing about
the horror of that betrayal--oh, he had put many faces on it, almost as many faces as It had put on for their benefit, but the monster at the bottom of everything was only George, running out into the receding flood with his paraffin-coated paper boat. Now would come the atonement.

  "You deserve to die for killing me," George whispered. He was very close now. Bill closed his eyes.

  Then yellow light splashed the tunnel and he opened them. Richie was holding up a match. "Fight It, Bill!" Richie shouted. "God's sake! Fight It!"

  What are you doing here? He looked at them, bewildered. They hadn't run after all. How could that be? How could that be after they had seen how foully he had murdered his own brother?

  "Fight It!" Beverly was screaming. "Oh Bill, fight It! Only you can do this one! Please--"

  George was less than five feet away now. He suddenly stuck his tongue out at Bill. It was crawling with white fungoid growths. Bill screamed again.

  "Kill It, Bill!" Eddie shouted. "That's not your brother! Kill It while it's small! Kill It NOW!"

  George glanced at Eddie, cutting his shiny-silver eyes that way for just a moment, and Eddie reeled back and struck the wall as if he had been pushed. Bill stood mesmerized, watching his brother come toward him, George again after all these years, it was George at the end as it had been George at the beginning, oh yes, and he could hear the creak of George's yellow slicker as George closed the distance, he could hear the jingle of the buckles on his overshoes and he could smell something like wet leaves, as if underneath the slicker George's body was made of them, as if the feet inside George's galoshes were leaf-feet, yes, a leaf-man, that was it, that was George, he was a rotted balloon face and a body made of dead leaves, the kind that sometimes choke the sewers after a flood.

  Dimly he heard Beverly shriek.

  (he thrusts his fists)

  "Bill, please Bill--"

  (against the posts and still insists)

  "We'll look for my boat together," George said. Thick yellow pus, mock tears, rolled down his cheeks. He reached for Bill and his head cocked sideward, his teeth peeling back from those fangs.

  (he sees the ghosts he sees the ghosts HE SEES)

  "We'll find it," George said and Bill could smell Its breath and it was a smell like exploded animals lying on the highway at midnight. As George's mouth yawned, he could see things squirming around inside there. "It's still down here, everything floats down here, we'll float, Bill, we'll all float--"

  George's fishbelly hand closed on Bill's neck.

  (HE SEES THE GHOSTS WE SEE THE GHOSTS THEY WE YOU SEE THE GHOSTS--)

  George's contorted face drifted toward Bill's neck.

  "--float--"

  "He thrusts his fists against the posts!" Bill cried. His voice was deeper, hardly his own at all, and in a searing flash of memory Richie remembered that Bill only stuttered in his own voice: when he pretended to be someone else, he never did.

  The George-thing recoiled, hissing, Its hand going to Its face in a warding-off gesture.

  "That's it!" Richie screamed deliriously. "You got It, Bill! Get It! Get It! Get It!"

  "He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts!" Bill thundered. He advanced on the George-thing. "You're no ghost! George knows I didn't mean for him to die! My folks were wrong! They took it out on me and that was wrong! Do you hear me?"

  The George-thing abruptly turned, squealing like a rat. It began to run and ripple under the yellow slicker. The slicker itself seemed to be dripping, running in bright blots of yellow. It was losing Its shape, becoming amorphous.

  "He thrusts his fists against the posts, you son of a bitch!" Bill Denbrough screamed, "and still insists he sees the ghosts!" He leaped at It and his fingers snagged in the yellow rainslicker that was no longer a rainslicker. What he grabbed felt like some strange warm taffy that melted under his fingers as soon as he had closed his fist around it. He fell to his knees. Then Richie yelled as the guttering match burned his fingers and they were plunged into darkness again.

  Bill felt something begin to grow in his chest, something hot and choking and as painful as fiery nettles. He gripped his knees and drew them up to his chin, hoping it would stop the pain, or perhaps ease it; he was dimly thankful for the dark, glad that the others couldn't see this agony.

  He heard a sound escape him--a wavering moan. There was a second; a third. "George!" he cried. "George, I'm sorry! I never meant for anything b-b-b-bad to huh-huhhappen!"

  Perhaps there was something else to say, but he could not say it. He was sobbing then, lying on his back with one arm over his eyes, remembering the boat, remembering the steady beat of the rain against his bedroom windows, remembering the medicines and the tissues on the nighttable, the faint ache of fever in his head and in his body, remembering George, most of all that: remembering George, George in his yellow hooded slicker.

  "George, I'm sorry!" he cried through his tears. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please, I'm suh-suh-SORRY--"

  And then they were around him, his friends, and no one lit a match, and someone held him, he didn't know who, Beverly maybe, or maybe Ben, or Richie. They were with him, and for that little while the darkness was kind.

  10

  Derryl5:30 A.M.

  By 5:30 it was raining hard. The weather forecasters on the Bangor radio stations expressed mild surprise and tendered mild apologies to all the people who had made plans for picnics and outings on the basis of yesterday's forecasts. Tough break, folks; just one of those odd weather patterns that sometimes developed in the Penobscot Valley with startling suddenness.

  On WZON, meteorologist Jim Witt described what he called an "extraordinarily disciplined" low-pressure system. That was putting it mildly. Conditions went from cloudy in Bangor to showery in Hampden to drizzly in Haven to moderate rain in Newport. But in Derry, only thirty miles from downtown Bangor, it was pouring. Travellers on Route 7 found themselves moving through water that was eight inches deep in places, and beyond the Rhulin Farms a plugged culvert in a dip had covered the highway with so much water that the highway was actually impassable. By six that morning the Derry Highway Patrol had orange DETOUR signs on both sides of the dip.

  Those who waited under the shelter on Main Street for the first bus of the day to take them to work stood looking over the railing at the Canal, where the water was ominously high in its concrete channel. There would be no flood, of course; all agreed on that. The water was still four feet below the high-water mark of 1977, and there had been no flood that year. But the rain came down with steady pounding persistence, and thunder grumbled in the low clouds. Water ran down Up-Mile Hill in streams and roared in the stormdrains and sewers.

  No flood, they agreed, but there was a patina of unease on every face.

  At 5:45 a power-transformer on a pole beside the abandoned Tracker Brothers' Truck Depot exploded in a flash of purple light, spraying twisted chunks of metal onto the shingled roof. One of the flying chunks of metal severed a high-tension wire, which also fell on the roof, spluttering and twisting like a snake, shooting an almost liquid stream of sparks. The roof caught fire in spite of the downpour, and soon the depot was blazing. The power-cable tumbled from the roof to the weedy verge that led around to the lot where small boys had once played baseball. The Derry Fire Department rolled for the first time that day at 6:02 A.M. and arrived at Tracker Brothers' at 6:09. One of the first firemen off the truck was Calvin Clark, one of the Clark twins with whom Ben, Beverly, Richie, and Bill had gone to school. His third step away from the truck brought the sole of his leather boot down on the live line. Calvin was electrocuted almost instantly. His tongue popped out of his mouth and his rubber fireman's coat began to smolder. He smelled like burning tires at the town dump.

  At 6:05 A.M., residents of Merit Street in the Old Cape felt something that might have been an underground explosion. Plates fell from shelves and pictures from walls. At 6:06, every toilet on Merit Street suddenly exploded in a geyser of shit and raw sewage as
some unimaginable reversal took place in the pipes which fed the holding tanks of the new waste-treatment plant in the Barrens. In some cases these explosions were strong enough to tear holes in bathroom ceilings. A woman named Anne Stuart was killed when an ancient gear-wheel catapulted from her toilet along with a gout of sewage. The gear-wheel went through the frosted glass of the shower door and passed through her throat like a terrible bullet as she washed her hair. She was nearly decapitated. The gear-wheel was a relic of the Kitchener Ironworks, and had found its way into the sewers almost three-quarters of a century before. Another woman was killed when the sudden violent reversal of sewage, driven by expanding methane gases, caused her toilet to explode like a bomb. The unfortunate woman, who was sitting on the john at the time and reading the current Banana Republic catalogue, was torn to pieces.

  At 6:19 A.M., a bolt of lightning struck the so-called Kissing Bridge, which spanned the Canal between Bassey Park and Derry High School. The splintered pieces were thrown high into the air and then rained down into the swiftly moving Canal to be carried away.

  The wind was rising. At 6:30 A.M., the gauge in the lobby of the courthouse building registered it at just over fifteen miles an hour. By 6:45, it had risen to twenty-four miles an hour.

  At 6:46 A.M., Mike Hanlon awoke in his room at the Derry Home Hospital. His return to consciousness was a kind of slow dissolve--for a long time he thought he was dreaming. If so, it was an odd sort of dream--an anxiety dream, his old psych prof Doc Abelson might have called it. There seemed to be no overt reason for the anxiety, but it was there all the same; the plain white room seemed to shriek menace.