They went to the low concrete wall and suddenly the clown popped up over its edge like a horrible jack-in-the –box, a clown with Georgie Denbrough's face, his hair slicked back, his mouth a hideous grin full of bleeding greasepaint, his eyes black holes. One hand clutched three balloons on a string. With the other he reached for the boy in the sailor suit and seized his neck.
'Nuh-Nuh-NO!' Bill cried, and reached for the picture.
Reached into the picture!
'Stop it, Bill!' Richie shouted, and grabbed for him.
He was almost too late. He saw the tips of Bill's fingers go through the surface of the photograph and into that other world. He saw the fingertips go from the warm pink of living flesh to the mummified cream color that passed for white in old photos. At the same tune they became small and disconnected. It was like the peculiar optical illusion one sees when one thrusts a hand into a glass bowl of water: the part of the hand underwater seems to be floating, disembodied, inches away from the part which is still out of the water.
A series of diagonal cuts slashed across Bill's fingers at the point where they ceased being his fingers and became photo-fingers; it was as if he had stuck his hand into the blades of a fan instead of into a picture.
Richie seized his forearm and gave a tremendous yank. They both fell over. George's album hit the floor and snapped tiself shut with a dry clap. Bill stuck his fingers in his mouth. Tears of pain stood in his eyes. Richie could see blood running down his palm to his wrist in thin streams.
'Let me see,' he said.
'Hu-Hurts,' Bill said. He held his hand out to Richie, palm down. There were ladderlike slash-cuts running up his index, second, and third fingers. The pinky had barely touched the surface of the photograph (if it had a surface), and although that finger had not been cut, Bill told Richie later that the nail had been neatly clipped, as if with a pair of manicurist's scissors.
'Jesus, Bill,' Richie said. Band – Aids. That was all he could think of. God, they had been lucky — if he hadn't pulled Bill's arm when he did, his fingers might have been amputated instead of just badly cut. 'We got to fix those up. Your mother can — '
'Neh-neh-never m-mind m-my muh-huther,' Bill said. He grabbed the photo album again, spilling drops of blood on the floor.
'Don't open that again!' Richie cried, grabbing frantically at Bill's shoulder. 'Jesus Christ, Billy, you almost lost your fingers !'
Bill shook him off. He flipped through the pages, and there was a grim determination on his face that scared Richie more than anything else. Bill's eyes looked almost mad. Hi s
wounded fingers printed George's album with new blood — it didn't look like ketchup yet, but when it had a little time to dry it would. Of course it would.
And here was the downtown scene again.
The Model-T stood in the middle of the intersection. The other cars were frozen in the places where they had been before. The man walking toward the intersection held the brim of his fedora; his coat once more belled out in mid-flap.
The two boys were gone.
There were no boys in the picture anywhere. But —
'Look,' Richie whispered, and pointed. He was careful to keep the tip of his finger well away from the picture. An arc showed just over the low concrete wall at the edge of the Canal — the top of something round.
Something like a balloon.
5
They got out of George's room just in time. Bill's mother was a voice at the foot of the stairs and a shadow on the wall. 'Have you boys been wrestling?' she asked sharply. 'I heard a thud.'
'Just a lih-lih-little, M-Mom.' Bill threw a sharp gla nce at Richie. Be quiet, it said.
'Well, I want you to stop it. I thought the ceiling was going to come right down on my head.'
'W-W-We will.'
They heard her go back toward the front of the house. Bill had wrapped his handkerchief around his bleeding hand; it was turning red and in a moment would start to drip. The boys went down to the bathroom, where Bill held his hand under the faucet until the bleeding stopped. Cleaned, the cuts looked thin but cruelly deep. Looking at their white lips and th e red meat just inside them made Richie feel sick to his stomach. He wrapped them with Band-Aids as fast as he could.
'H-H-Hurts like hell,' Bill said.
'Well, why'd you want to go and put your hand in there, you wet end?'
Bill looked solemnly at the rings of Band –Aids on his fingers, then up at Richie. 'I-I-It was the cluh-hown,' he said. 'It w-w-was the c-clown pretending to be Juh-Juh-George.'
'That's right,' Richie said. 'Like it was the clown pretending to be the mummy when Ben saw it. Like it was the clown pretending to be that sick bum Eddie saw.'
'The luh-luh –leper.'
'Right.'
'But ih-is it r-r-really a cluh-cluh-clown?'
'It's a monster,' Richie said flatly. 'Some kind of monster. Some kind of monster right here in Derry. And it's killing kids.'
6
On a Saturday, not long after the incident of the dam in the Barrens, Mr Nell, and the picture that moved, Richie, Ben, and Beverly Marsh came face to face with not one monster but two — and they paid to do it. Richie did, anyway. These monsters were scary but not really dangerous; they stalked their victims on the screen of the Aladdin Theater while Richie, Ben, and Bev watched from the balcony.
One of the monsters was a werewolf, played by Michael Landon, and he was cool because even when he was the werewolf he still had sort of a duck's ass haircut. The other was this
smashed-up hotrodder, played by Gary Conway. He was brought back to life by a descendant of Victor Frankenstein, who fed all parts he didn't need to a bunch of alligators he kept in the basement. Also on the program: a MovieTone Newsreel that showed the latest Paris fashions and the latest Vanguard rocket explosions at Cape Canaveral, two Warner Brothers cartoons, one Popeye cartoon, and a Chilly Willy cartoon (for some reason the hat Chilly Willy wore always cracked Richie up), and PREVUES OF COMING ATTRACTIONS. The coming attractions included two pictures Richie immediately put on his gotta-see list: I Married a Monster fromOuter Space and The Blob.
Ben was very quiet during the show. Ole Haystack had nearly been spotted by Henry, Belch, and Victor earlier, and Richie assumed that was all that was troubling him. Ben, however, had forgotten all about the creeps (they were sitting close to the screen down below, chucking popcorn boxes at each other and hooting). Beverly was the reason for his silence. Her nearness was so overwhelming that he was almost ill with it. His body would break out in goosebumps and then, if she should so much as shift in her seat, his skin would flash hot, as if with a tropical fever. When her hand brushed his reaching for the popcorn, he trembled with exaltation. He thought later that those three hours in the dark next to Beverly had been both the longest and shortest hours of his life.
Richie, unaware that Ben was in deep throes of calf-love, was feeling just as fine as paint. In his book the only thing any better than a couple of Francis the Talking Mule pictures was a couple of horror pictures in a theater filled with kids, all of them yelling and screaming at the gory parts. He certainly did not connect any of the goings-ons in the two low-budget American-International pictures they were watching with what was going on in town . . . not then, at least.
He had seen the Twin Shock Show Saturday Matinee ad in the News on Friday morning and had almost immediately forgotten how badly he had slept the night before — and how he had finally gotten up and turned on the light in his closet, a real baby trick for sure, but he hadn' t been able to get a wink of sleep until he'd done it. But by the following morning things had seemed normal again . . . well, almost. He began to think that maybe he and Bill had just shared a hallucination. Of course the cuts on Bill's fingers weren't a hallucination, but maybe they'd just been paper-cuts from some of the sheets in Georgie's album. Pretty thick paper. Could of been. Maybe. Besides, there was no law saying he had to spend the next ten years thinking about it, was there? Nope.