It (146 page)

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

Mike cleaned, neatened, and thought his thoughts, while another part of his brain expected that he would finish and 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 went 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 fire-proof 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 a few 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 lightbulbs, smelling the familiar library scents of must and dust and cinnamony, aging 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 there's worse ways.

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 he was 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 relock the wire mesh. He sat down and flipped through the pages he had written, thinking what a strange, crippled affidavit it was: part history, part scandal, part diary, part confessional. He had not logged an entry 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 quietly 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 looked 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 those 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 denim pantlegs. Faded blue strings hung 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 eyes. His fingers felt one wooden corner of a small box—the overdue cards. A smaller 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 tightly 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 apelike.

“Who are you?”

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.

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

The shape took another step forward and 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 gonna say howdy, nigger?” Henry asked.

“Hello, 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 eyes. His lips parted in an unspeakable grin, revealing rotted back-Maine teeth.

“Voices,” he said. “You ever 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.
Its
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 inlays 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 plant 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 lightning like 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 fingers 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 niggerboogienightfighterjunglebunnyapemancoon!” 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.