It (152 page)

The Plymouth rolled down Up-Mile Hill and made its way around the counter-clockwise traffic circle . . . except at this time of night there was no traffic; all the traffic-lights had changed to yellow blinkers splashing the empty streets and closed buildings with steady pulses of light. It was so quiet that Henry could hear the relays clicking inside each light . . . or was that his imagination?

“Never meant to leave you behind that day, Belcher,” Henry said. “I mean, if that was, you know, on your mind.”

That scream of dried tendons again. Belch looking at him again with his one sunken eye. And his lips stretched in a terrible grin that revealed gray-black gums which were growing their own garden
of mold.
What sort of a grin is that?
Henry asked himself as the car purred silkily up Main Street, past Freese's on the one side, Nan's Luncheonette and the Aladdin Theater on the other.
Is it a forgiving grin? An old-pals grin? Or is it the kind of grin that says I'm going to get you, Henry, I'm going to get you for running out on me and Vic? What kind of grin?

“You have to understand how it was,” Henry said, and then stopped. How
had
it been? It was all confused in his mind, the pieces jumbled up like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that had just been dumped out on one of the shitty cardtables in the rec room at Juniper Hill. How
had
it been, exactly? They had followed the fatboy and the bitch back to Kansas Street and had waited back in the bushes, watching them climb up the embankment to the top. If they had disappeared from view, he and Victor and Belch would have dropped the stalking game and simply gone after them; two of them were better than none at all, and the rest would be along in time.

But they hadn't disappeared. They had simply leaned against the fence, talking and watching the street. Every now and then they would check down the slope into the Barrens, but Henry kept his two troops well out of sight.

The sky, Henry remembered, had become overcast, clouds moving in from the east, the air thickening. There would be rain that afternoon.

What had happened next? What—

A bony, leathery hand closed over his forearm and Henry screamed. He had been drifting away again into that cottony grayness, but Belch's dreadful touch and the dagger of pain in his stomach from the scream brought him back. He looked around and Belch's face was less than two inches from Henry's; he gasped in breath and wished he hadn't. The ole Belcher really had gone to seed. Henry was again reminded of tomatoes going quietly putrescent in some shadowy shed corner. His stomach roiled.

He remembered the end suddenly—the end for Belch and Vic, anyway. How something had come out of the darkness as they stood in a shaft with a sewer-grating at the top, wondering which way to go next.
Something
 . . . Henry hadn't been able to tell what. Until Victor shrieked,
“Frankenstein! It's Frankenstein!”
And so it was, it was the Frankenstein monster, with bolts coming out of its neck and a deep
stitched scar across its forehead, lurching along in shoes like a child's blocks.

“Frankenstein!”
Vic had screamed,
“Fr
—” And then Vic's head was gone, Vic's head was flying across the shaftway to strike the stonework of the far side with a sour sticky thud. The monster's watery yellow eyes had fallen on Henry, and Henry had frozen. His bladder let go and he felt warmth flood down his legs.

The creature lurched toward him, and Belch . . . Belch had . . .

“Listen, I know I ran,” Henry said. “I shouldn't have done that. But . . . but . . .”

Belch only stared.

“I got lost,” Henry whispered, as if to tell the ole Belcher that he had paid, too. It sounded weak, like saying
Yeah, I know you got killed, Belch, but I got one
fuck
of a splinter under my thumbnail.
But it
had
been bad . . . really bad. He had wandered around in a world of stinking darkness for hours, and finally, he remembered, he had started to scream. At some point he had fallen—a long, dizzying fall, in which he had time to think
Oh good in a minute I'll be dead, I'll be out of this—
and then he had been in fast-running water. Under the Canal, he supposed. He had come out into fading sunlight, had flailed his way toward the bank, and had finally climbed out of the Kenduskeag less than fifty yards from the place where Adrian Mellon would drown twenty-six years later. He slipped, fell, bashed his head, blacked out. When he woke up it was after dark. He had somehow found his way out to Route 2 and had hooked a ride to the home place. And there the cops had been waiting for him.

But that was then and this was now. Belch had stepped in front of Frankenstein's monster and it had peeled the left side of his face down to the skull—so much Henry had seen before fleeing. But now Belch was back, and Belch was pointing at something.

Henry saw that they had pulled up in front of the Derry Town House, and suddenly he understood perfectly. The Town House was the only real hotel left in Derry. Back in '58 there had also been the Eastern Star at the end of Exchange Street, and the Traveller's Rest on Torrault Street. Both had disappeared during urban renewal (Henry knew all about this; he had read the Derry
News
faithfully every day in Juniper Hill). Only the Town House was left, and a bunch of ticky-tacky little motels out by the Interstate.

That's where they'll be,
he thought.
Right in there. All of them that are left. Asleep in their beds, with visions of sugarplums—or sewers, maybe—dancing in their heads. And I'll get them. One by one, I'll get them.

He took the bottle of Texas Driver out again and bit off a snort. He could feel fresh blood trickling into his lap, and the seat was tacky beneath him, but the wine made it better; the wine seemed to make it not matter. He could have done with some good bourbon, but the Driver was better than nothing.

“Look,” he said to Belch, “I'm sorry I ran. I don't know why I ran. Please . . . don't be mad.”

Belch spoke for the first and only time, but the voice wasn't his voice. The voice that came from Belch's rotting mouth was deep and powerful, terrifying. Henry whimpered at the sound of it. It was the voice from the moon, the voice of the clown, the voice he had heard in his dreams of drains and sewers where water rushed on and on.

“Just shut up and get them,” the voice said.

“Sure,” Henry whined. “Sure, okay, I
want
to, no problem—”

He put the bottle back in the glove compartment. Its neck chattered briefly like teeth. And he saw a paper where the bottle had been. He took it out and unfolded it, leaving bloody fingerprints on the corners. Embossed across the top was this logo, in bright scarlet:

Below this, carefully printed in capital letters:

Their room numbers. That was good. That saved time. “Thanks, Be—”

But Belch was gone. The driver's seat was empty. There was only
the New York Yankees baseball cap lying there, mold crusted on its bill. And some slimy stuff on the knob of the gearshift.

Henry stared, his heart beating painfully in his throat . . . and then he seemed to hear something move and shift in the back seat. He got out quickly, opening the door and almost falling to the pavement in his haste. He gave the Fury, which still burbled softly through its dual cherry-bomb mufflers (cherry-bombs had been outlawed in the State of Maine in 1962), a wide berth.

It was hard to walk; each step pulled and tore at his belly. But he gained the sidewalk and stood there, looking at the eight-floor brick building which, along with the library and the Aladdin Theater and the seminary, was one of the few he remembered clearly from the old days. Most of the lights on the upper floors were out now, but the frosted-glass globes which flanked the main doorway blazed softly in the darkness, haloed with moisture from the lingering groundfog.

Henry made his laborious way toward and between them, shouldering open one of the doors.

The lobby was wee-hours silent. There was a faded Turkish rug on the floor. The ceiling was a huge mural, executed in rectangular panels, which showed scenes from Derry's logging days. There were overstuffed sofas and wing chairs and a great fireplace which was now dead and silent, a birch log thrown across the andirons—a real log, no gas; the fireplace in the Town House was not just a piece of lobby stage dressing. Plants spilled out of low pots. The glass double doors leading to the bar and the restaurant were closed. From some inner office, Henry could hear the gabble of a TV, turned low.

He lurched across the lobby, his pants and shirt streaked with blood. Blood was grimed into the folds of his hands; it ran down his cheeks and slashed his forehead like warpaint. His eyes bulged from their sockets. Anyone in the lobby who had seen him would have run, screaming, in terror. But there was no one.

The elevator doors opened as soon as he pushed the
UP
button. He looked at the paper in his hand, then at the floor buttons. After a moment of deliberation, he pushed 6 and the doors closed. There was a faint hum of machinery as the elevator began to rise.

Might as well start at the top and work my way down.

He slumped against the rear wall of the car, eyes half-closed. The hum of the elevator was soothing. Like the hum of the machinery in
the pumping-stations of the drainage system. That day: it kept coming back to him. How everything seemed almost prearranged, as if all of them were just playing parts. How Vic and the ole Belcher had seemed . . . well, almost drugged. He remembered—

The car came to a stop, jolting him and sending another wave of griping pain into his stomach. The doors slid open. Henry stepped out into the silent hallway (more plants here, hanging ones, spiderplants, he didn't want to touch any of them, not those oozy green runners, they reminded him too much of the things that had been hanging down there in the dark). He rechecked the paper. Kaspbrak was in 609. Henry started down that way, running one hand along the wall for support, leaving a faint bloody track on the wallpaper as he went (ah, but he stepped away whenever he came close to one of the hanging spiderplants; he wanted no truck with
those):
His breathing was harsh and dry.

Here it was. Henry pulled the switchblade from his pocket, swashed his dry lips with his tongue, and knocked on the door. Nothing. He knocked again, louder this time.

“Whozit?” Sleepy. Good. He'd be in his 'jammies, only half-awake. And when he opened the door, Henry would drive the switchblade directly into the hollow at the base of his neck, the vulnerable hollow just below the adam's apple.

“Bellboy, sir,” Henry said. “Message from your wife.” Did Kaspbrak have a wife? Maybe that had been a stupid thing to say. He waited, coldly alert. He heard footsteps—the shuffle of slippers.

“From Myra?” He sounded alarmed. Good. He would be more alarmed in a few seconds. A pulse beat steadily in Henry's right temple.

“I guess so, sir. There's no name. It just says your wife.”

There was a pause, then a metallic rattle as Kaspbrak fumbled with the chain. Grinning, Henry pushed the button on the switchblade's handle.
Click.
He held the blade up by his cheek, ready. He heard the thumb-bolt turn. In just a moment he would plunge the blade into the skinny little creep's throat. He waited. The door opened and Eddie

The Losers All Together/1:20
P.M.

saw Stan and Richie just coming out of the Costello Avenue Market, each of them eating a Rocket on a push-up stick. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, wait up!”

They turned around and Stan waved. Eddie ran to join them as quickly as he could, which was not, in truth, very quickly. One arm was immured in a plaster-of-Paris cast and he had his Parcheesi board under the other.

“Whatchoo say, Eddie? Whatchoo say, boy?” Richie asked in his grandly rolling Southern Gentleman Voice (the one that sounded more like Foghorn Leghorn in the Warner Brothers cartoons than anything else). “Ah say . . . Ah say . . . the boy's got a broken ahm! Lookit that, Stan, the boy's got a broken ahm! Ah say . . . be a good spote and carreh the boy's Pawcheeseh bo-wud for him!”

“I can carry it,” Eddie said, a little out of breath. “How about a lick on your Rocket?”

“Your mom wouldn't approve, Eddie,” Richie said sadly. He began to eat faster. He had just gotten to the chocolate stuff in the middle, his favorite part.
“Germs,
boy! Ah say . . . Ah say you kin get
germs
eatin after someone else!”