It (131 page)

Still, she couldn't look away.

She saw that Patrick's
thing
had gotten a little longer, but not much; it still dangled between his legs like a snake with no backbone. Henry's, however, had grown amazingly. It stood up stiff and hard, almost poking his bellybutton. Patrick's hand went up and down, up and down, sometimes pausing to squeeze, sometimes tickling that odd, heavy sac under Henry's
thing.

Those are his balls,
Beverly thought.
Do boys have to go around with those all the time? God, I'd go
crazy! Another part of her mind then whispered:
Bill has those.
On its own, her mind visualized her holding them, cupping them in her hand, testing their texture . . . and that hot feeling raced through her again, sparking off a furious blush.

Henry stared at Patrick's hand as if hypnotized. His lighter lay on the rocky scree beside him, reflecting hot afternoon sun.

“Want me to put it in my mouth?” Patrick asked. His big, livery lips smiled complacently.

“Huh?” Henry asked, as if startled from some deep dream.

“I'll put it in my mouth if you want. I don't m—”

Henry's hand flashed out, half-curled, not quite a fist. Patrick was knocked sprawling. His head thudded on the gravel. Beverly dived down again, her heart crashing in her chest, her teeth locked against a little whimpering moan. After knocking Patrick down, Henry had turned and for a moment, just before she dropped back into her little huddled ball on the passenger side of the driveshaft hump, it seemed that her eyes and Henry's had locked.

Please God the sun was in his eyes,
she prayed.
Please God I'm sorry I peeked. Please God.

There was an agonizing pause then. Her white blouse was plastered to her body with sweat. Droplets like seed pearls gleamed on her tanned arms. Her bladder throbbed painfully. She felt that very soon she would wet her pants. She waited for Henry's furious crazy face to appear in the opening where the Ford's passenger door had been, sure it was going to happen—how could he have missed seeing her? He would drag her out and hurt her. He would—

A new and even more terrible thought now occurred to her, and once again she had to engage in a painful, crampy struggle to keep from wetting her pants. Suppose he did something to her with his
thing?
Suppose he wanted her to put it in her somewhere? She knew where it was
supposed
to go, all right; it seemed that knowledge had suddenly sprung into her mind full-blown. She thought that if Henry tried to put his
thing
in her she would go crazy.

Please no, please God don't let him have seen me, please, okay?

Then Henry spoke, and to her growing horror his voice was coming from someplace much closer. “I don't go for that queer stuff.”

From farther off, Patrick's voice: “You liked it.”

“I didn't
like
it!” Henry shouted. “And if you tell anyone I did, I'll
kill
you, you fucking little pansy!”

“You got a boner,” Patrick said. He sounded like he was smiling. As much as she feared Henry Bowers, the smile would not have sur
prised Beverly. Patrick was crazy, crazier than Henry, maybe, and people
that
crazy weren't afraid of anything. “I saw it.”

Footsteps crunched over the gravel—closer and closer. Beverly looked up, her eyes bulging. Through the Ford's old windshield she could now see the back of Henry's head. He was looking toward Patrick now, but if he turned around—

“If you tell anyone, I'll say you're a cocksucker,” Henry said. “Then I'll kill you.”

“You don't scare me, Henry,” Patrick said, and giggled. “But I might not tell if you gave me a dollar.”

Henry shifted restlessly. He turned slightly; Beverly could now see one-quarter of his profile instead of just the back of his head.
Please God please God,
she begged incoherently, and her bladder throbbed more strongly.

“If you tell,” Henry said, his voice low and deliberate, “I'll tell what you've been doing with the cats. With the dogs, too. I'll tell them about your refrigerator. You know what'll happen, Hockstetter? They'll come and take you away and put you into the fucking-A looneybin.”

Silence from Patrick.

Henry drummed his fingers on the hood of the Ford Beverly was hiding in. “Do you hear me?”

“I hear you.” Patrick sounded sullen now. Sullen and a little scared. He burst out: “You liked it! You got a boner! Biggest boner I ever saw!”

“Yeah, I bet you seen a lot of em, you fuckin little homo faggot. You just remember what I said about the refrigerator.
Your
refrigerator. And if I see you around again, I'll knock your block off.”

More silence from Patrick.

Henry moved away. Beverly turned her head and saw him pass by the driver's side of the Ford. If he had looked to his left even a little bit, he would have seen her. But he didn't look. A moment later she heard him heading off the way Victor and Belch had gone.

Now there was just Patrick.

Beverly waited, but nothing happened. Five minutes dragged by. Her need to urinate was now desperate. She might be able to hold out for another two or three minutes, but no more. And it made her uneasy not to know for sure where Patrick was.

She peeked through the windshield again and saw him just sitting there. Henry had forgotten his lighter. Patrick had put his schoolbooks back into a small canvas carrier sack and had slung it around his neck like a newsboy's, but his pants and underpants were still down around his ankles. He was playing with the lighter. He would spin the wheel, produce a flame that was almost invisible in the bright day, snap the lighter closed, and then start all over again. He seemed hypnotized. A line of blood ran from the corner of his mouth to his chin, and his lips were swelling up on the right side. He seemed not to notice, and once again Beverly felt a squirmy sort of revulsion. Patrick was crazy, all right; she had never in her life wanted so badly to get away from someone.

Moving very carefully, she crawled backward over the Ford's driveshaft hump and squeezed under the steering wheel. She put her feet out on the ground and crept to the back of the Ford. Then she ran quickly back the way she had come. When she had entered the pines beyond the junked cars, she looked back over her shoulder. No one was there. The dump dozed in the sun. She felt the bands of tension around her chest and stomach loosen with relief, and all that was left was the need to urinate, so great that she now felt sick with it.

She hurried down the path a short way and then ducked off to the right. She had her shorts unsnapped almost before the underbrush had closed behind her again. She took a quick look around to make sure there was no poison ivy at hand; then she squatted, holding the tough trunk of a bush for balance.

She was pulling her shorts up again when she heard approaching footsteps from the dump. All she could see through the bushes were flashes of blue denim and the faded plaid of a school-shirt. It was Patrick. She ducked down, waiting for him to pass by toward Kansas Street. She was more sanguine about her position here. The cover was good, she no longer had to pee, and Patrick was off in his own cuckoo world. When he was gone she would double back and head for the clubhouse.

But Patrick didn't pass by. He stopped on the path almost directly opposite her and stood looking at the rusting Amana refrigerator.

Beverly could observe Patrick along a natural sight-line in the bushes without too much chance of being seen. Now that she was relieved, she found she was curious again—and if Patrick did happen to
see her, she felt certain she could outrun him. He wasn't as fat as Ben, but he was podgy. She pulled the Bullseye out of her back pocket, however, and put half a dozen steel pellets in the breast pocket of her old Ship 'n Shore. Crazy or not, a good one to the knee might discourage the likes of Patrick Hockstetter in a hurry.

She remembered the refrigerator well enough now. There were lots of discarded fridges at the dump, but it suddenly occurred to her that this was the only one she'd seen which Mandy Fazio hadn't disarmed by either tearing out the latching mechanism with pliers or simply removing the door altogether.

Patrick began to hum and sway back and forth in front of the rusty old refrigerator, and Beverly felt a fresh chill course through her. He was like a guy in a horror movie trying to summon a dead body out of a crypt.

What's he up to?

But if she had known that, or what was going to happen when Patrick finished his private ritual and opened the dead Amana's rusty door, she would have run away as fast as she could.

No one—not even Mike Hanlon—had the slightest idea of how crazy Patrick Hockstetter really was. He was twelve, the son of a paint salesman. His mother was a devout Catholic who would die of breast cancer in 1962, four years after Patrick was consumed by the dark entity which existed in and below Derry. Although his IQ tested out as low normal, Patrick had already repeated two grades, the first and third. He was taking summer classes this year so he would not have to repeat the fifth as well. His teachers found him an apathetic student (this several of them noted on the bare six lines of the Derry Elementary School's report cards reserved for
TEACHER'S COMMENTS
) and a rather disturbing one as well (which none noted—their feelings were too vague, too diffuse, to be expressed in sixty lines, let alone six). If he had been born ten years later, a guidance counsellor might have steered him toward a child psychologist who might (or might not; Patrick was far more clever than his lackluster IQ results
indicated) have realized the frightening depths behind that slack and pallid moonface.

He was a sociopath, and perhaps, by that hot July in 1958, he had become a full-fledged psychopath. He could not remember a time when he had believed that other people—any other living creatures, for that matter—were “real.” He believed himself to be an actual creature, probably the only one in the universe, but was by no means convinced that his actuality made him “real.” He had no sense of hurting, exactly, and no real sense of being hurt (his indifference to being struck in the mouth by Henry in the dump was a case in point). But while he found reality a totally meaningless concept, he understood the concept of “rules” perfectly. And while all of his teachers had found him odd (both Mrs. Douglas, his fifth-grade teacher, and Mrs. Weems, who had had Patrick in the third grade, knew about the pencil-box full of flies, and while neither of them totally ignored the implications, each had between twenty and twenty-eight other students, each with problems of his or her own), none of them had serious disciplinary problems with him. He might turn in test papers that were utterly blank—or blank except for a large, decorative question-mark—and Mrs. Douglas had discovered it was best to keep him away from the girls because of his Roman hands and Russian fingers, but he was quiet, so quiet that there were times when he might have been taken for a big lump of clay that had been crudely fashioned to look like a boy. It was easy to ignore a Patrick, who failed quietly, when you had to cope with boys like Henry Bowers and Victor Criss, who were actively disruptive and insolent, boys who would steal milk-money or happily deface school property if given a chance, and girls like the unfortunately named Elizabeth Taylor, who was epileptic and whose few poor brain-cells worked only sporadically and who had to be discouraged from pulling her dresses up in the playyard to show off a new pair of panties. In other words, Derry Elementary School was the typical confused educational carnival, a circus with so many rings that Pennywise himself might have gone unnoticed. Certainly none of Patrick's teachers (or his parents, for that matter) suspected that, when he was five, Patrick had murdered his baby brother Avery.

Patrick had not liked it when his mother brought Avery home
from the hospital. He didn't care (or so he at first told himself) if his parents had two kids, five kids, or five dozen kids, as long as the kid or kids didn't alter his own schedule. But he found that Avery did. Meals came late. The baby cried in the night and woke him up. It seemed that his parents were always hanging over its crib, and often when he tried to get their attention he found that he could not. For one of the few times in his life, Patrick became frightened. It occurred to him that if his parents had brought
him,
Patrick, home from the hospital, and if he
was
“real,” then Avery might be “real,” too. It might even be that, when Avery got big enough to walk and talk, to bring in his father's copy of the Derry
News
from the front step and to hand his mother the bowls when she baked bread, they might decide to get rid of Patrick altogether. It was not that he feared they loved Avery more (although it was obvious to Patrick that they
did
love him more, and in this case his judgment was probably correct). What he cared about was (1) the rules that were being broken or had changed since Avery's arrival, (2) Avery's possible reality, and (3) the possibility that they might throw
him
out in favor of Avery.

Patrick went into Avery's room one afternoon around two-thirty, shortly after the school-bus had dropped him off from his afternoon kindergarten session. It was January. Outside, snow was beginning to fall. A powerful wind boomed across McCarron Park and rattled the frosty upstairs storm windows. His mother was napping in her bedroom; Avery had been fussy all the previous night. His father was at work. Avery was sleeping on his stomach, his head turned to one side.

Patrick, his moonface expressionless, turned Avery's head so his face was pressed directly into the pillow. Avery made a snuffling noise and turned his head back to the side. Patrick observed this, and stood thinking about it while the snow melted off his yellow boots and puddled on the floor. Perhaps five minutes passed (quick thinking was not Patrick's specialty), and then he turned Avery's face into the pillow again and held it there for a moment. Avery stirred under his hand, struggling. But his struggles were weak. Patrick let go. Avery turned his head to the side again, made one snorting little cry, and then went on sleeping. The wind gusted, rattling the windows. Patrick waited to see if the one little cry would awaken his mother. It didn't.