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 —
But you say grownups and now it sounds like nonsense; it sounds like so much bibble-babble. Why is that, Richie? Why?
Because Derry is as weird as ever. Why don't we just leave it at that?
Because things weren't that simple, that was why.
As a kid he had been a goof-off, a sometimes vulgar, sometimes amusing comedian, because it was one way to get along without getting killed by kids like Henry Bowers or going absolutely loony-tunes with boredom and loneliness. He realized now that a lot of the problem had been his own mind, which was usually moving at a speed ten or twenty times that of his classmates. They had thought him strange, weird, or even suicidal, depending on the escapade in question, but maybe it had been a simple case of mental overdrive — i f anything about being in constant mental overdrive was simple.
Anyway, it was the sort of thing you got under control after awhile — you got it under control or you found outlets for it, guys like Kinky Briefcase or Buford Kissdrivel, for instance. Richie had discovered that in the months after he had wandered into the college radio station, pretty much on a whim, and had discovered everything he had ever wanted during his first week behind the microphone. He hadn't been very good at first; he had been too excited to be good. But he had understood his potential not to be just good at the job bu t great at it, and just that knowledge had been enough to put him over the moon on a cloud of euphoria. At the same time he had begun to understand the great principle that moved the universe, at least that part of the universe which had to do with career s and success: you found the crazy guy who was running around inside of you, fucking up your life. You chased him into a corner and grabbed him. But you didn't kill him. Oh no. Killing was too good for the likes of that little bastard. You put a harness over his head and then started plowing. The crazy guy worked like a demon once you had him in the traces. And he supplied you with a few chucks from time to tune. That was really all there was. And that was enough.
He had been funny, all right, a laugh a minute, but in the end he had outgrown the nightmares that were on the dark side of all those laughs. Or he thought he had. Until today, when the word grownup suddenly stopped making sense to his own ears. And now here was something else to cope with, or at least think about; here was the huge and totally idiotic statue of Paul Bunyan in front of City Center.
I must be the exception that proves the rule, Big Bill.
Are you sure there was nothing, Richie? Nothing at all?
Up by City Center . . . I thought I saw . . .
Sharp pain needled at his eyes for the second time that day and he clutched at them, a startled moan coming out of him. Then it was gone again, as quickly as it had come. But he had also smelled something, hadn't he? Something that wasn't really there, but something that had been there, something that made him think of
(I'm right here with you Richie hold my hand can you catch hold)
Mike Hanlon. It was smoke that had made his eyes sting and water. Twenty-seven years ago they had breathed that smoke; in the end there had just been Mike and himself left and they had seen —
But it was gone.