'I worry about you, Bevvie . . . I worry a LOT!'
She turned, swirls of red hair floating around her face, to see her father staggering toward her down the hallway, wearing the witch's black dress and skull cameo; her father's face hung with doughy, running flesh, his eyes as black as obsidian, his hands clenching and unclenching, his mouth grinning with soupy fervor.
'I beat you because I wanted to FUCK you, Bevvie, that's all I wanted to do, I wanted to FUCK you, I wanted to EAT you, I wanted to eat your PUSSY, I wanted to SUCK your CLIT up between my teeth, YUM-YUM, Bevvie, oooohhhhh, YUMMY IN MY TUMMY, I wanted to put you in the cage . . . and get the oven hot . . . and feel your CUNT . . . your plump CUNT . . . and when it was plump enough to eat . . . to eat . . . EAT . . . '
Screaming, she grasped the sticky doorknob and bolted out onto a porch that was decorated with praline doodads and floored with fudge. Far away, dim, seeming to swim in her vision, she saw cars passing back and forth, and a woman pushing a cartful of groceries back from Costello's.
I have to get out there, she thought, just barely coherent. That's reality out there, if I can only get out to the sidewalk -
'Won't do you any good to run, Bevvie,' her father
(my fadder)
told her, laughing. 'We've waited a long time for this. This is going to be fun. This is going to be YUMMY in our TUMMIES.'
She looked back again and now her dead father was not wearing the witch's black dress but the clown suit with the big orange buttons. There was a 1958-style coonskin cap, the kind popularized by Fess Parker in the Disney movie about Davy Crockett, perched on its head. In one hand it held a bunch of balloons. In the other it held the leg of a child like a chicken drumstick. Written on each balloon was the legend IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE.
'Tell your friends I am the last of a dying race,' it said, grinning its sunken grin as it staggered and lurched down the porch steps after her. 'The only survivor of a dying planet. I have come to rob all the women . . . rape all the men . . . and learn to do the Peppermint Twist!'
It began to do a mad shuck-and-jive, balloons in one hand, severed, bleeding leg in the other. The clown costume writhed and flapped, but Beverly felt no wind. Her legs tangled in each other and she spilled to the pavement, throwing out her palms to take up the shock, which went all the way to her shoulders. The woman pushing the grocery cart paused and looked back doubtfully, then hurried on a little faster.
The clown came toward her again, casting the severed leg aside. It landed on the lawn with an indescribable thud. Beverly only lay sprawled on the pavement for a moment, sure somewhere inside that she must wake soon, this couldn't be real, had to be a dream -
She realized that wasn't true a moment before the clown's crooked, long-clawed fingers touched her. It was real; it could kill her. As it had killed the children.
'The grackles know your real name!' she screamed at it suddenly. It recoiled, and it seemed to her that for a moment the grin on the lips inside the great red grin that had been painted on and around them became a grimace of hate and pain . . . and perhaps of fear as well. It might only have been her imagination, and she certainly had no idea why she had said such a crazy thing, but it bought her an instant of time.
She was on her feet and running. Brakes squealed and a hoarse voice, both mad and scared, yelled: 'Why don't you look where you're going, you dumb quiff!' She had a blurred impression of the bakery truck that had almost hit her when she bolted into the street like a child after a rubber ball, and then she was standing on the opposite sidewalk, panting, a hot stitch in her left side. The bakery truck went on down Lower Main.
The clown was gone. The leg was gone. The house still stood there, but she saw now that it was crumbling and deserted, the windows boarded up, the steps leading up to the porch cracked and broken.
Was I really in there, or did I dream it all?
But her jeans were dirty, her yellow blouse smeared with dust.
And there was chocolate on her fingers.
She rubbed them on the legs of her jeans and walked away fast, her face hot, her back cold as ice, her eyeballs seeming to pulse in and out with the rapid thud of her heart.
We can't beat It. Whatever It is, we can't beat It. It even wants us to try - It wants to settle the old score. Can't be happy with a draw, I guess. We ought to get out of here . . . just leave.
Something brushed against her calf, light as a cat's questing paw.
She jerked away from it with a little shriek. She looked down and cringed, one hand against her mouth.
It was a balloon, as yellow as her blouse. Written on the side of it in electric blue were the words THAT'S WIGHT, WABBIT.
As she watched, it went bouncing lightly up the street, urged by the pleasant
late-spring breeze.
4
Richie Tozier Makes Tracks
Well, there was the day Henry and his friends chased me - before the end of school, this was . . .
Richie was walking along Outer Canal Street, past Bassey Park. Now he stopped, hands stuffed in his pockets, looking toward the .Kissing Bridge but not really seeing it.
I got away from them in the toy department of Freese's . . .
Since the mad conclusion of the reunion lunch, he had been walking aimlessly, trying to make his peace with the awful things which had been in the fortune cookies . . . or the things which had seemed to be in the cookies. He thought that most likely nothing at all had come out of them. It had been a group hallucination brought on by all the spooky shit they had been talking about. The best proof of the hypothesis was that Rose had seen nothing at all. Of course, Beverly's parents had never seen any of the blood that came out of the bathroom drain either, but this wasn't the same.
No? Why not?
'Because we're grownups now,' he muttered, and discovered the thought had absolutely no power or logic at all; it might as well have been a nonsense line from a kid's skip-rope chant.
He started to walk again.
I went up by City Center and sat down on a park bench for awhile and I thought I saw . . .
He stopped again, frowning.
Saw what?
. .. but that was just something I dreamed.
Was it? Was it really?
He looked to the left and saw the big glass-brick-and-steel building that had looked so modern in the late fifties and now looked rather antique and tacky.
And here I am, he thought. Right back to fucking City Center. Scene of that other hallucination. Or dream. Or whatever it was.
The others saw him as the Klass Klown, the Krazy Kut-up, and he had fallen neatly and easily into that role again. Ah, we all fell neatly and easily back into our old roles again, didn't you notice? But was there anything very unusual about that? He thought you would probably see much the same thing at any tenth or twentieth high school reunion - the class comedian who had discovered a vocation for the priesthood in college would, after two drinks, revert almost automatically to the wiseacre he had been; the Great English Brain who had wound up with a GM truck dealership would suddenly begin spouting off about John Irving or John Cheever; the guy who had played with the Moondogs on Saturday nights and who had gone on to become a mathematics professor at Cornell would suddenly find himself on stage with the band, a Fender guitar strapped over his shoulder, whopping out 'Gloria' or 'Surfin' Bird' with gleeful drunken ferocity. What was it Springsteen said? No retreat, baby, no surrender . . . but it was easier to believe in the oldies on the record-player after a couple of drinks or some pretty good Panama Red.
But, Richie believed, it was the reversion that was the hallucination, not the present life. Maybe the child was the father of the man, but fathers and sons often shared very different interests and only a passing resemblance. They -