It Read online

  "Methinks the lady doth protest too much," Richie said slyly.

  She turned quickly in her seat and gave him a hard look, her color high. "Just what's that supposed to mean, Richie Tozier?"

  "Doan hits me, Miz Scawlett!" Richie cried in a high, trembling Pickaninny Voice--and in that moment Bill could see with an eerie clarity the boy he had known; he was not just a superseded presence lurking under Rich Tozier's grownup exterior but a creature almost more real than the man himself. "Doan hits me! Lemme bring you anothuh mint joolip, Miz Scawlett! Youse goan drink hit out on de po'ch where it's be a little bit cooluh! Doan whup disyere boy!"

  "You're impossible, Richie," Beverly said coldly. "You ought to grow up."

  Richie looked at her, his grin fading slowly into uncertainty. "Until I came back here," he said, "I thought I had."

  "Rich, you may just be the most successful disc jockey in the United States," Mike said. "You've certainly got L.A. in the palm of your hand. On top of that there are two syndicated programs, one of them a straight top-forty countdown show, the other one something called The Freaky Forty--"

  "You better watch out, fool," Richie said in a gruff Mr. T Voice, but he was blushing. "I'll make your front and back change places. I'll give you brain-surgery with my fist. I'll--"

  "Eddie," Mike went on, ignoring Richie, "you've got a healthy limousine service in a city where you just about have to elbow long black cars out of your way when you cross the street. Two limo companies a week go smash in the Big Apple, but you're doing fine.

  "Ben, you're probably the most successful young architect in the world."

  Ben opened his mouth, probably to protest, and then closed it again abruptly.

  Mike smiled at them, spread his hands. "I don't want to embarrass anyone, but I do want all the cards on the table. There are people who succeed young, and there are people who succeed in highly specialized jobs--if there weren't people who bucked the odds successfully, I guess everybody would give up. If it was just one or two of you, we could pass it off as coincidence. But it's not just one or two; it's all of you, and that includes Stan Uris, who was the most successful young accountant in Atlanta ... which means in the whole South. My conclusion is that your success stems from what happened here twenty-seven years ago. If you had all been exposed to asbestos at that time and had all developed lung cancer by now, the correlative would be no less clear or persuasive. Do any of you want to dispute it?"

  He looked at them. No one answered.

  "All except you," Bill said. "What happened to you, Mikey?"

  "Isn't it obvious?" He grinned. "I stayed here."

  "You kept the lighthouse," Ben said. Bill jerked around and looked at him, startled, but Ben was staring hard at Mike and didn't see. "That doesn't make me feel so good, Mike. In fact, it makes me feel sort of like a bugturd."

  "Amen," Beverly said.

  Mike shook his head patiently. "You have nothing to feel guilty about, any of you. Do you think it was my choice to stay here, any more than it was your choice--any of you--to leave? Hell, we were kids. For one reason or another your parents moved away, and you guys were part of the baggage they took along. My parents stayed. And was it really their decision--any of them? I don't think so. How was it decided who would go and who would stay? Was it luck? Fate? It? Some Other? I don't know. But it wasn't us guys. So quit it. "

  "You're not ... not bitter?" Eddie asked timidly.

  "I've been too busy to be bitter," Mike said. "I've spent a long time watching and waiting.... I was watching and waiting even before I knew it, I think, but for the last five years or so I've been on what you might call red alert. Since the turn of the year I've been keeping a journal. And when a man writes, he thinks harder ... or maybe just more specifically. And one of the things I've spent time writing and thinking about is the nature of It. It changes; we know that. I think It also manipulates, and leaves Its marks on people just by the nature of what It is--the way you can smell a skunk on you even after a long bath, if it lets go its bag of scent too near you. The way a grasshopper will spit bugjuice into your palm if you catch it in your hand."

  Mike slowly unbuttoned his shirt and spread it wide. They could all see the pinkish scrawls of scar across the smooth brown skin of his chest between the nipples.

  "The way claws leave scars," he said.

  "The werewolf," Richie almost moaned. "Oh Christ, Big Bill, the werewolf! When we went back to Neibolt Street!"

  "What?" Bill asked. He sounded like a man called out of a dream. "What, Richie?"

  "Don't you remember?"

  "No ... do you?"

  "I ... I almost do ..." Looking both confused and scared, Richie subsided.

  "Are you saying this thing isn't evil?" Eddie asked Mike abruptly. He was staring at the scars as if hypnotized. "That it's just some part of the ... the natural order?"

  "It's no part of a natural order we understand or condone," Mike said, rebuttoning his shirt, "and I see no reason to operate on any other basis than the one we do understand: that It kills, kills children, and that's wrong. Bill understood that before any of us. Do you remember, Bill?"

  "I remember that I wanted to kill It," Bill said, and for the first time (and ever after) he heard the pronoun gain proper-noun status in his own voice. "But I didn't have much of a world-view on the subject, if you see what I mean--I just wanted to kill It because It killed George."

  "And do you still?"

  Bill considered this carefully. He looked down at his spread hands on the table and remembered George in his yellow slicker, his hood up, the paper boat with its thin glaze of paraffin in one hand. He looked up at Mike.

  "M-M-More than ever," he said.

  Mike nodded as if this were exactly what he had expected. "It left Its mark on us. It worked Its will on us, just as It has worked Its will on this whole town, day in and day out, even during those long periods when It is asleep or hibernating or whatever It does between Its more ... more lively periods."

  Mike raised one finger.

  "But if It worked Its will on us, at some point, in some way, we also worked our will on It. We stopped It before It was done--I know we did. Did we weaken It? Hurt It? Did we, in fact, almost kill It? I think we did. I think we came so close to killing It that we went away thinking we had."

  "But you don't remember that part either, do you?" Ben asked.

  "No. I can remember everything up until August 15th 1958 with almost perfect clarity. But from then until September 4th or so, when school was called in again, everything is a total blank. It isn't murky or hazy; it is just completely gone. With one exception: I seem to remember Bill screaming about something called the deadlights."

  Bill's arm jerked convulsively. It struck one of his empty beer bottles, and the bottle shattered on the floor like a bomb.

  "Did you cut yourself?" Beverly asked. She had half-risen.

  "No," he said. His voice was harsh and dry. His arms had broken out in gooseflesh. It seemed that his skull had somehow grown; he could feel

  (the deadlights)

  it pressing out against the stretched skin of his face in steady numbing throbs.

  "I'll pick up the--"

  "No, just sit down." He wanted to look at her and couldn't. He couldn't take his eyes off Mike.

  "Do you remember the deadlights, Bill?" Mike asked softly.

  "No," he said. His mouth felt the way it did when the dentist got a little too enthusiastic with the novocaine.

  "You will."

  "I hope to God I don't."

  "You will anyway," Mike said. "But for now... no. Not me, either. Do any of you?"

  One by one they shook their heads.

  "But we did something," Mike said quietly. "At some point we were able to exercise some sort of group will. At some point we achieved some special understanding, whether conscious or unconscious." He stirred restlessly. "God, I wish Stan was here. I have a feeling that Stan, with his ordered mind, might have had some idea."

 
"Maybe he did," Beverly said. "Maybe that's why he killed himself. Maybe he understood that if there was magic, it wouldn't work for grownups."

  "I think it could, though," Mike said. "Because there's one other thing we six have in common. I wonder if any of you have realized what that is."

  It was Bill's turn to open his mouth and then shut it again.

  "Go on," Mike said. "You know what it is. I can see it on your face."

  "I'm not sure I know," Bill replied, "but I think w-we're all childless. Is that ih-it?"

  There was a moment of shocked silence.

  "Yeah," Mike said. "That's it."

  "Jesus Christ Almighty!" Eddie spoke up indignantly. "What in the world does that have to do with the price of beans in Peru? What gave you the idea that everyone in the world has to have kids? That's nuts!"

  "Do you and your wife have children?" Mike asked.

  "If you've been keeping track of us all the way you said, then you know goddam well we don't. But I still say it doesn't mean a damn thing."

  "Have you tried to have children?"

  "We don't use birth control, if that's what you mean." Eddie spoke with an oddly moving dignity, but his cheeks were flushed. "It just so happens that my wife is a little ... Oh hell. She's a lot overweight. We went to see a doctor and she told us my wife might never have kids if she didn't lose some weight. Does that make us criminals?"

  "Take it easy, Eds," Richie soothed, and leaned toward him.

  "Don't call me Eds and don't you dare pinch my cheek!" he cried, rounding on Richie. "You know I hate that! I always hated it!"

  Richie recoiled, blinking.

  "Beverly?" Mike asked. "What about you and Tom?"

  "No children," she said. "Also no birth control. Tom wants kids... and so do I, of course," she added hastily, glancing around at them quickly. Bill thought her eyes seemed overbright, almost the eyes of an actress giving a good performance. "It just hasn't happened yet."

  "Have you had those tests?" Ben asked her.

  "Oh yes, of course," she said, and uttered a light laugh that was almost a titter. And in one of those leaps of comprehension that sometimes come to people who are gifted with both curiosity and insight, Bill suddenly understood a great deal about Beverly and her husband Tom, alias the Greatest Man in the World. Beverly had gone to have fertility tests. His guess was that the Greatest Man in the World had refused to entertain even for a moment the notion that there might be something wrong with the sperm being manufactured in the Sacred Sacs.

  "What about you and your wife, Big Bill?" Rich asked. "Been trying?" They all looked at him curiously .. because his wife was someone they knew. Audra was by no means the best-known or the best-loved actress in the world, but she was certainly part of the celebrity coinage that had somehow replaced talent as a medium of exchange in the latter half of the twentieth century; there had been a picture of her in People magazine when she cut her hair short, and during a particularly boring stretch in New York (the play she had been planning to do Off Broadway fell through) she had done a week-long stint on Hollywood Squares, over her agent's strenuous objections. She was a stranger whose lovely face was known to them. He thought Beverly looked particularly curious.

  "We've been trying off and on for the last six years," Bill said. "For the last eight months or so it's been off, because of the movie we were doing--Attic Room, it's called."

  "You know, we run a little entertainment syndie every day from five-fifteen in the afternoon until five-thirty," Richie said. "Seein' Stars, it's called. They had a feature on that damned movie just last week--Husband and Wife Working Happily Together kind of thing. They said both of your names and I never made the connection. Funny, isn't it?"

  "Very," Bill said. "Anyway, Audra said it would be just our luck if she caught pregnant while we were in preproduction and she had to do ten weeks of strenuous acting and being morning-sick at the same time. But we want kids, yes. And we've tried quite hard."

  "Had fertility tests?" Ben asked.

  "Uh-huh. Four years ago, in New York. The doctors discovered a very small benign tumor in Audra's womb, and they said it was a lucky thing because, although it wouldn't have prevented her from getting pregnant, it might have caused a tubal pregnancy. She and I are both fertile, though."

  Eddie repeated stubbornly, "It doesn't prove a goddam thing."

  "Suggestive, though," Ben murmured.

  "No little accidents on your front, Ben?" Bill asked. He was shocked and amused to find that his mouth had very nearly called Ben Haystack instead.

  "I've never been married, I've always been careful, and there have been no paternity suits," Ben said. "Beyond that I don't think there's any real way of telling."

  "You want to hear a funny story?" Richie asked. He was smiling, but there was no smile in his eyes.

  "Sure," Bill said. "You were always good at the funny stuff, Richie."

  "Your face and me own buttocks, boyo," Richie said in the Irish Cop's Voice. It was a great Irish Cop's Voice. You've improved out of all measure, Richie, Bill thought. As a kid, you couldn't do an Irish Cop no matter how you busted your brains. Except once ... or twice ... when (the deadlights)

  was that?

  "Your face and me own buttocks; just keep rememb'rin that com-pay-ri-son, me foine bucko."

  Ben Hanscom suddenly held his nose and cried in a high quavering boyish voice: "Beep-beep, Richie! Beep-beep! Beep-beep!"

  After a moment, laughing, Eddie held his own nose and joined in. Beverly did the same.

  "Awright! Awright!" Richie cried, laughing himself. "Awright, I give up! Chrissake!"

  "Oh man," Eddie said. He collapsed back in his chair, laughing so hard he was almost crying. "We gotcha that time, Trashmouth. Way to go, Ben."

  Ben was smiling but he looked a little bewildered.

  "Beep-beep," Bev said, and giggled. "I forgot all about that. We always used to beep you, Richie."

  "You guys never appreciated true talent, that's all," Richie said comfortably. As in the old days, you could knock him off-balance, but he was like one of those inflatable Joe Palooka dolls with sand in the base--he floated upright again almost at once. "That was one of your little contributions to the Losers' Club, wasn't it, Haystack?"

  "Yeah, I guess it was."

  "What a man!" Richie said in a trembling, awestruck voice and then began to salaam over the table, nearly sticking his nose in his tea-cup each time he went down. "What a man! Oh chillun, what a man!"

  "Beep-beep, Richie," Ben said solemnly, and then exploded laughter in a hearty baritone utterly unlike his wavering childhood voice. "You're the same old roadrunner."

  "You guys want to hear this story or not?" Richie asked. "I mean, no big deal one way or the other. Beep away if you want to. I can take abuse. I mean, you're looking at a man who once did an interview with Ozzy Osbourne."

  "Tell it," Bill said. He glanced over at Mike and saw that Mike looked happier--or more at rest--since the luncheon had begun. Was it because he saw the almost unconscious knitting-together that was happening, the sort of easy falling-back into old roles that almost never happened when old chums got together? Bill thought so. And he thought, If there are certain preconditions for the belief in magic that makes it possible to use the magic, then maybe those preconditions will inevitably arrange themselves. It was not a very comforting thought. It made him feel like a man strapped to the nosecone of a guided missile.

  Beep-beep indeed.

  "Well," Richie was saying, "I could make this long and sad or I could give you the Blondie and Dagwood comic-strip version, but I'll settle for something in the middle. The year after I moved out to California I met a girl, and we fell pretty hard for each other. Started living together. She was on the pill at first, but it made her feel sick almost all the time. She talked about getting an IUD, but I wasn't too crazy about that--the first stories about how they might not be completely safe were just starting to come out in the papers.

  "We had talked a lot abo
ut kids, and had pretty well decided we didn't want them even if we decided to legalize the relationship. Irresponsible to bring kids into such a shitty, dangerous, overpopulated world ... and blah-blah-blah, babble-babble-babble, let's go out and put a bomb in the men's room of the Bank of America and then come on back to the crashpad and smoke some dope and talk about the difference between Maoism and Trotskyism, if you see what I mean.

  "Or maybe I'm being too hard on both of us. Shit, we were young and reasonably idealistic. The upshot was that I got my wires cut, as the Beverly Hills crowd puts it with their unfailing vulgar chic. The operation went with no problem and I had no adverse aftereffects. There can be, you know. I had a friend whose balls swelled up to roughly the size of the tires on a 1959 Cadillac. I was gonna give him a pair of suspenders and a couple of barrels for his birthday--sort of a designer truss--but they went down before then."

  "All put with your customary tact and dignity," Bill remarked, and Beverly began to laugh again.

  Richie offered a large, sincere smile. "Thank you, Bill, for those words of support. The word 'fuck' was used two hundred and six times in your last book. I counted."

  "Beep-beep, Trashmouth," Bill said solemnly, and they all laughed. Bill found it nearly impossible to believe they had been talking about dead children less than ten minutes ago.

  "Press onward, Richie," Ben said. "The hour groweth late."

  "Sandy and I lived together for two and a half years," Richie went on. "Came really close to getting married twice. As things turned out, I guess we saved ourselves a lot of heartache and all that community-property bullshit by keeping it simple. She got an offer to join a corporate law-firm in Washington around the same time I got an offer to come to KLAD as a weekend jock--not much, but a foot in the door. She told me it was her big chance and I had to be the most insensitive male chauvinist oinker in the United States to be dragging my feet, and furthermore she'd had it with California anyway. I told her I also had a chance. So we thrashed it out, and we trashed each other out, and at the end of all the thrashing and trashing Sandy went.

  "About a year after that I decided to try and get the vasectomy reversed. No real reason for it, and I knew from the stuff I'd read that the chances were pretty spotty, but I thought what the hell."