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 thoughtdimly. 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 LA. 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 HONOUR 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 VOCLAIST 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 iswhat 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 die underarm of his Rodeo Drive sportcoat. He rolled over, gamed his feet, staggered, looked back. The down 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 nisty 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 vibrating, 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 man 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?'