It (94 page)

“Shit,” Richie said in a tiny wavering voice, and then uttered an uncertain laugh.

He stood there awhile longer, waiting to see if the statue would move again—perhaps wink, perhaps shift its axe from one shoulder to the other, perhaps come down and have at him again. But of course none of those things happened.

Of course.

What, me worry? Har-de-har-har-har.

A doze. A dream. No more than that.

But, as Abraham Lincoln or Socrates or someone like that had once observed, enough was enough. It was time to go home and cool out; to make like Kookie on
77 Sunset Strip
and just lay chilly.

And although it would have been quicker to cut through the City Center grounds, he decided not to. He didn't want to get close to that statue again. So he had gone the long way around and by that evening he had nearly forgotten the incident.

Until now.

Here sits a man,
he thought,
here sits a man dressed in a mossy-green sportcoat purchased at one of the best shops on Rodeo Drive; here sits a man with Bass Weejuns on his feet and Calvin Klein underwear to cover his ass; here sits a man with soft contact lenses resting easily on his eyes; here sits a man remembering the dream of a boy who thought an Ivy League shirt with a fruit-loop on the back and a pair of Snap-Jack shoes was the height of fashion; here sits a grownup looking at the same old statue, and hey, Paul, Tall Paul, I'm here to say you're the same in every way, you ain't aged a motherfucking day.

The old explanation still rang true in his mind: a dream.

He supposed he could believe in monsters if he had to; monsters were no big deal. Hadn't he sat in radio studios at one time or another reading news copy about such fellows as Idi Amin Dada and Jim Jones and that guy who had blown away all those folks in a McDonald's just down the road apiece? Shitfire and save matches, monsters were cheap! Who needed a five-buck movie ticket when you could read about them in the paper for thirty-five cents or hear about them on the radio for free? And he supposed if he could believe in the Jim Jones variety, he could believe in Mike Hanlon's version, at least for awhile; It even had Its own sorry charm, because It came from
Outside
and no one had to claim responsibility for It. He could believe in a monster that had as many faces as there are rubber masks in a novelty shop (if you're gonna have one, you might as well have a pack of em,
he thought, cheaper by the dozen, right, gang?), at least for the sake of argument . . . but a thirty-foot-high plastic statue that stepped off its pedestal and then tried to carve you up with its plastic axe? That was just a little too ripe. As Abraham Lincoln or Socrates or someone had
also
said, I'll eat fish and I'll eat meat, but there is some shit I will not eat. It just wasn't—

That sharp needling pain struck his eyes again, without warning, jerking a dismayed cry from him. This was the worst yet, going deeper and lasting longer, scaring the bejesus out of him. He clapped his hands to his eyes and then groped instinctively for the bottom lids with his forefingers, meaning to pop his contacts out.
It's maybe some kind of infection,
he thought dimly.
But Jesus it hurts!

He pulled the lids down and was ready to give the single practiced blink that would send them tumbling out (and he would spend the next fifteen minutes grovelling myopically for them in the gravel surrounding the bench but Jesus God who gave a shit, right now it felt like there were
nails
in his eyes), when the pain disappeared. It did not dwindle; it just went. One moment there, the next moment gone. His eyes teared briefly and then stopped.

He lowered his hands slowly, his heart running fast in his chest, ready to blink them out the instant the pain started again. It didn't. And suddenly he found himself thinking about the only horror movie that had ever really scared him as a kid, possibly because he had taken so much shit about his glasses and had spent so much time thinking about his eyes. That movie had been
The Crawling Eye,
with Forrest Tucker. Not very good. The other kids had laughed themselves into hysterics over it, but Richie had not laughed. Richie had been rendered cold and white and dumb, for once with not a single Voice to command, as that gelatinous tentacled eye came out of the manufactured fog of some English movie set, waving its fibrous tentacles in front of it. The sight of that eye had been very bad, the embodiment of a hundred not-quite-realized fears and disquiets. On some night not long after, he had dreamed of looking at himself in a mirror and bringing a large pin up and sticking it slowly into the black iris of his eye and feeling a numb, watery springiness as the bottom of his eye filled up with blood. He remembered—
now
he remembered—waking up and discovering that he had wet the bed. The best indicator of how gruesome that dream had been was that his primary feeling
had been not shame at his nocturnal indiscretion but relief; he had embraced the warm wet patch with his body and blessed the reality of his sight.

“Fuck this,” Richie Tozier said in a low voice that was not quite steady, and started to get up.

He would go back to the Derry Town House and take a nap. If this was Memory Lane, he preferred the L.A. Freeway at rush-hour. The pain in his eyes was probably no more than a signal of exhaustion and jet-lag, plus the stress of meeting the past all at once, in one afternoon. Enough shocks; enough exploring. He didn't like the way his mind was skittering from one subject to the next. What was that Peter Gabriel tune? “Shock the Monkey.” Well, this monkey had been shocked enough. It was time to catch some z's and maybe gain a little perspective.

As he rose his eyes went to the marquee in front of City Center again. All at once the strength ran out of his legs and he sat down again. Hard.

RICHIE TOZIER MAN OF 1000 VOICES

RETURNS TO DERRY LAND OF 1000 DANCES

IN HONOR OF TRASHMOUTH'S RETURN

CITY CENTER PROUDLY

PRESENTS

THE RICHIE TOZIER “ALL-DEAD” ROCK SHOW

BUDDY HOLLY RICHIE VALENS THE BIG BOPPER

FRANKIE LYMON GENE VINCENT MARVIN GAYE

HOUSE BAND

JIMI HENDRIX LEAD GUITAR

JOHN LENNON RHYTHM GUITAR

PHIL LINOTT BASS GUITAR

KEITH MOON DRUMS

SPECIAL GUEST VOCALIST JIM MORRISON

WELCOME HOME RICHIE!

YOU'RE DEAD TOO!

He felt as if someone had whopped all the breath out of him . . . and then he heard that sound again, that sound that was half pressure on the skin and eardrums, that keen homicidal whispering rush—
Swiipppp!
He rolled off the bench onto the gravel, thinking
So this is what they mean by
déjà-vu,
now you know, you'll never have to ask anybody again—

He hit on his shoulder and rolled, looking up at the Paul Bunyan statue—only it was no longer Paul Bunyan. The clown stood there instead, resplendent and evident, fantastic in plastic, twenty feet of Day-Glo colors, its painted face surmounting a cosmic comic ruff. Orange pompom buttons cast in plastic, each as big as a volleyball, ran down the front of the silvery suit. Instead of an axe it held a huge bunch of plastic balloons. Engraved on each were two legends:
IT'S STILL ROCK AND ROLL TO ME
and
RICHIE TOZIER'S “ALL-DEAD” ROCK SHOW
.

He scrambled backward, using his heels and his palms. Gravel went down the back of his pants. He heard a seam tear loose in the underarm of his Rodeo Drive sportcoat. He rolled over, gained his feet, staggered, looked back. The clown looked down at him. Its eyes rolled wetly in their sockets.

“Did I give you a scare, m'man?” it rumbled.

And Richie heard his mouth say, quite independently of his frozen brain: “Cheap thrills in the back of my car, Bozo. That's all.”

The clown grinned and nodded as if it had expected no more. Red paint-bleeding lips parted to show teeth like fangs, each one coming to a razor point. “I could have you now if I wanted you now,” it said. “But this is going to be too much fun.”

“Fun for me too,” Richie heard his mouth say. “The most fun of all when we come to take your fucking head off, baby.”

The clown's grin spread wider and wider. It raised one hand, clad in a white glove, and Richie felt the wind of the movement blow the hair off his forehead as it had on that day twenty-seven years ago. The clown's index finger popped out at him. It was as big as a beam.

Big as a bea—,
Richie thought, and then the pain struck again. It drove rusty spikes into the soft jelly of his eyes. He screamed and clutched at his face.

“Before removing the mote from thy neighbor's eye, attend the beam in thine own,” the clown intoned, its words rumbling and vi
brating, and Richie was again enveloped in the sweet stink of its carrion breath.

He looked up, and took half a dozen hurried steps backward. The clown was bending down, its gloved hands on its gaily pantalooned knees.

“Want to play some more, Richie? How about if I point at your pecker and give you prostate cancer? Or I could point at your head and give you a good old brain tumor—although I'm sure some people would say that would only be adding to what was already there. I can point at your mouth and your stupid flapping tongue will turn into so much running pus. I can do it, Richie. Want to see?”

Its eyes were widening, widening, and in those black pupils, each as big as a softball, Richie saw the mad darkness that must exist over the rim of the universe; he saw a shitty happiness that he felt would drive him insane. In that moment he understood It could do any of these things and more.

And yet again he heard his mouth, but this time it was not his voice, or any of his created Voices, past or present; it was a Voice he had never heard before. Later he would tell the others, hesitantly, that it was a kind of Mr. Jiveass Nigger Voice, loud and proud, self-parodying and screechy. “Git off mah case you big ole honky clown!” he shouted, and suddenly he was laughing again. “No shit an no shine, muhfuh! I got d'walk, I got d'talk, and I got d'big boppin cock! I got d'
time,
I got d'
mine,
I'm a
man
wit' a
plan
an if you doan
shit,
you goan
git!
You hear me, you whiteface bunghole?”

Richie thought the clown recoiled, but he did not stick around to find out for sure. He ran, elbows pumping, sportcoat flying out in wings behind him, not caring that a father who had stopped so his toddler could admire Paul was now staring warily at him, as if he had gone crazy.
As a matter of fact, folks,
Richie thought,
I
feel
like I've gone crazy. Oh God do I ever. And that had to have been the shittiest Grandmaster Flash imitation in history but somehow it did the trick, somehow—

And then the clown's voice thundered after him. The father of the little boy did not hear it, but the toddler's face suddenly pinched in upon itself and he began to wail. The dad picked his son up and hugged him, bewildered. Even through his own terror, Richie observed this little sideshow closely. The voice of the clown was perhaps angrily gleeful, perhaps just angry:
“We've got the eye down here,
Richie . . . you hear me? The one that crawls. If you don't want to fly, don't wanna say goodbye, you come on down under this here town and give a great big hi to one great big eye! You come down and see it anytime. Just any old time you like. You hear me, Richie? Bring your yo-yo. Have Beverly wear a big full skirt with four or five petticoats underneath. Have her wear her husband's ring around her neck! Get Eddie to wear his saddle-shoes! We'll play some bop, Richie! We'll play AAALLLL THE HITS!”

Reaching the sidewalk, Richie dared to look back over his shoulder, and what he saw was in no way comforting. Paul Bunyan was still gone, and now the clown was gone, too. Where they had stood there was now a twenty-foot-high plastic statue of Buddy Holly. He was wearing a button on one of the narrow lapels of his plaid sportcoat.
RICHIE TOZIER'S “ALL-DEAD” ROCK SHOW
, the button read.

One bow of Buddy's glasses had been mended with adhesive tape.

The little boy was still crying hysterically; his father was walking rapidly back toward downtown with the weeping child in his arms. He gave Richie a wide berth.

Richie got walking

(feets don't fail me now)

trying not to think about

(we'll play AAALLLL THE HITS!)

what had just happened. All he wanted to think about was the monster jolt of Scotch he was going to have in the Derry Town House bar before he went up to take that nap.

The thought of a drink—just your ordinary garden-variety drink—made him feel a little better. He looked over his shoulder one more time and the fact that Paul Bunyan was back, grinning at the sky, plastic axe over his shoulder, made him feel better still. Richie began to walk faster, making tracks, putting distance between himself and that statue. He had even begun to think about the possibility of hallucinations when the pain struck his eyes again, deep and agonizing, causing him to cry out hoarsely. A pretty young girl who had been walking ahead of him, looking dreamily up at the breaking clouds, looked back at him, hesitated, then hurried over.

“Mister, are you all right?”

“It's my contacts,” he said in a strained voice. “My damned contact le—
oh my God that hurts!”

This time he got his forefingers up so quickly he almost jabbed
them into his eyes. He pulled down the lower lids and thought,
I won't be able to blink them out, that's what's going to happen, I won't be able to blink them out and it's just going to go on hurting and hurting and hurting until I go blind go blind go bl—