It (84 page)

“Way to go, Eds,” Richie said. “We're really gonna have ourselves some chucks this time, I bet.”

“Beep-beep, Richie,” Eddie said in a wavering voice.

“So what's your one idea, Mike?” Bill asked. The mood had been broken by Rose, the hostess, who had come in with a dish of fortune cookies. She looked around at the six people who had their hands in the air with a carefully polite lack of curiosity. They lowered them hastily, and no one said anything until Rose was gone again.

“It's simple enough,” Mike said, “but it might be pretty damn dangerous, too.”

“Spill it,” Richie said.

“I think we ought to split up for the rest of the day. I think each of us ought to go back to the place in Derry he or she remembers best . . . outside the Barrens, that is. I don't think any of us should go there—not yet. Think of it as a series of walking-tours, if you like.”

“What's the purpose, Mike?” Ben asked.

“I'm not entirely sure. You have to understand that I'm going pretty much on intuition here—”

“But this has got a good beat and you can dance to it,” Richie said.

The others smiled. Mike did not; he nodded instead. “That's as good a way of putting it as any. Going on intuition
is
like picking up a beat and dancing to it. Using intuition is a hard thing for grownups to do, and that's the main reason I think it might be the right thing for us to do. Kids, after all, operate on it about eighty percent of the time, at least until they're fourteen or so.”

“You're talking about plugging back into the situation,” Eddie said.

“I suppose so. Anyway, that's my idea. If no specific place to go comes to you, just follow your feet and see where they take you. Then we meet tonight, at the library, and talk over what happened.”

“If
anything
happens,” Ben said.

“Oh, I think things will.”

“What sort of things?” Bill asked.

Mike shook his head. “I have no idea. I think whatever happens is apt to be unpleasant. I think it's even possible that one of us may not turn up at the library tonight. No reason for thinking that . . . except that intuition thing again.”

Silence greeted this.

“Why alone?” Beverly asked finally. “If we're supposed to do this as a group, why do you want us to start alone, Mike? Especially if the risk really turns out to be as high as you think it might be?”

“I think I can answer that,” Bill said.

“Go ahead, Bill,” Mike said.

“It
started
alone for each of us,” Bill said to Beverly. “I don't remember everything—not yet—but I sure remember that much. The picture in George's room that moved. Ben's mummy. The leper that Eddie saw under the porch on Neibolt Street. Mike finding the blood on the grass near the Canal in Bassey Park. And the bird . . . there was something about a bird, wasn't there, Mike?”

Mike nodded grimly.

“A big bird.”

“Yes, but not as friendly as the one on
Sesame Street.”

Richie cackled wildly. “Derry's answer to James Brown Gets Off A Good One! Oh chillun, is we blessed or is we blessed!”

“Beep-beep, Richie,” Mike said, and Richie subsided.

“For you it was the voice from the pipe and the blood that came out of the drain,” Bill said to Beverly. “And for Richie . . .” But here he paused, puzzled.

“I must be the exception that proves the rule, Big Bill,” Richie said. “The first time I came in contact with anything that summer that was weird—I mean really big-league weird—was in George's room, with you. When you and I went back to your house that day and looked at his photo album. The picture of Center Street by the Canal started to move. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” Bill said. “But are you sure there was nothing before that, Richie? Nothing at all?”

“I—” Something flickered in Richie's eyes. He said slowly, “Well, there was the day Henry and his friends chased me—before the end of school, this was, and I got away from them in the toy department of Freese's. I went up by City Center and sat down on a park bench for awhile and I thought I saw . . . but that was just something I
dreamed.”

“What was it?” Beverly asked.

“Nothing,” Richie said, almost brusquely. “A dream. Really.” He looked at Mike. “I don't mind taking a walk, though. It'll kill the afternoon. Views of the old homestead.”

“So we're agreed?” Bill asked.

They nodded.

“And we'll meet at the library tonight at . . . when do you suggest, Mike?”

“Seven o'clock. Ring the bell if you're late. The libe closes at seven on weekdays until summer vacation starts for the kids.”

“Seven it is,” Bill said, and let his eyes range soberly over them. “And be careful. You want to remember that none of us really knows what we're d-d-doing. Think of this as reconnaissance. If you should see something, don't fight. Run.”

“I'm a lover, not a fighter,” Richie said in a dreamy Michael Jackson Voice.

“Well, if we're going to do it, we ought to get going,” Ben said. A small smile pulled up the left corner of his mouth. It was more bitter than amused. “Although I'll be damned if I could tell you right this minute where I'm going to go, if the Barrens are out. That was the
best of it for me—going down there with you guys.” His eyes moved to Beverly, held there for a moment, moved away. “I can't think of anyplace else that means very much to me. Probably I'll just wander around for a couple of hours, looking at buildings and getting wet feet.”

“You'll find a place to go, Haystack,” Richie said. “Visit some of your old food-stops and gas up.”

Ben laughed. “My capacity's gone down a lot since I was eleven. I'm so full you guys may just have to roll me out of here.”

“Well, I'm all set,” Eddie said.

“Wait a sec!” Beverly cried as they began to push back from their chairs. “The fortune cookies! Don't forget those!”

“Yeah,” Richie said. “I can see mine now.
YOU WILL SOON BE EATEN UP BY A LARGE MONSTER. HAVE A NICE DAY
.”

They laughed and Mike passed the little bowl of fortune cookies to Richie, who took one and then sent it on around the table. Bill noticed that no one opened his or her cookie until each had one; they sat with the little hat-shaped cookies either in front of them or held in their hands, and even as Beverly, still smiling, picked hers up, Bill felt a cry rising in his throat:
No! No, don't do that, it's part of it, put it back, don't open it!

But it was too late. Beverly had broken hers open, Ben was doing the same to his, Eddie was cutting into his with the edge of his fork, and just before Beverly's smile turned to a grimace of horror Bill had time to think:
We knew, somehow we
knew,
because no one simply bit into his or her fortune cookie. That would have been the normal thing to do, but no one did it. Somehow, some part of us still remembers . . . everything.

And he found that insensate underknowledge somehow the most horrifying realization of all; it spoke more eloquently than Mike could have about how surely and deeply It had touched each one of them . . . and how Its touch was still upon them.

Blood spurted up from Beverly's fortune cookie as if from a slashed artery. It splashed across her hand and then gouted onto the white napery which covered the table, staining it a bright red that sank in and then spread out in grasping pink fingers.

Eddie Kaspbrak uttered a strangled cry and pushed himself away from the table with such a sudden revolted confusion of arms and legs that his chair nearly tipped over. A huge bug, its chitinous carapace
an ugly yellow-brown, was pushing its way out of his fortune cookie as if from a cocoon. Its obsidian eyes stared blindly forward. As it lurched onto Eddie's bread-and-butter plate, cookie crumbs fell from its back in a little shower that Bill heard clearly and which came back to haunt his dreams when he slept for awhile later that afternoon. As it freed itself entirely it rubbed its thin rear legs together, producing a dry reedy hum, and Bill realized it was some sort of terribly mutated cricket. It lumbered to the edge of the dish and tumbled onto the tablecloth on its back.

“Oh God!” Richie managed in a choked voice. “Oh God Big Bill it's an eye dear God it's an eye a fucking
eye—”

Bill's head snapped around and he saw Richie staring down at his fortune cookie, his lips drawn back from his teeth in a kind of sickened leer. A chunk of his cookie's glazed surface had fallen onto the tablecloth, revealing a hole from which a human eyeball stared with glazed intensity. Cookie crumbs were scattered across its blank brown iris and embedded in its sclera.

Ben Hanscom threw his—not a calculated throw but the startled reaction of a person who has been utterly surprised by some piece of nasty work. As his fortune cookie rolled across the table Bill saw two teeth inside its hollow, their roots dark with clotted blood. They rattled together like seeds in a hollow gourd.

He looked back at Beverly and saw she was hitching in breath to scream. Her eyes were fixed on the thing that had crawled out of Eddie's cookie, the thing that was now kicking its sluggish legs as it lay overturned on the tablecloth.

Bill got moving. He was not thinking, only reacting.
Intuition,
he thought crazily as he lunged out of his seat and clapped his hand over Beverly's mouth just before she could utter the scream.
Here I am, acting on intuition. Mike should be proud of me.

What came out of Beverly's mouth was not a scream but a strangled “
Mmmmph!”

Eddie was making those whistling sounds that Bill remembered so well. No problem there, a good honk on the old lung-sucker would set Eddie right.
Right as a trivet,
Freddie Firestone would have said, and Bill wondered—not for the first time—why a person had such weird thoughts at times like these.

He glanced around fiercely at the others, and what came out was
something else from that summer, something that sounded both impossibly archaic and exactly right: “Dummy up! All of you! Not one sound! Just
dummy up!”

Rich wiped a hand across his mouth. Mike's complexion had gone a dirty gray, but he nodded at Bill. All of them moved away from the table. Bill had not opened his own fortune cookie, but now he could see its sides moving slowly in and out—bulge and relax, bulge and relax, bulge and relax—as his own party-favor tried to escape.

“Mmmmmph!”
Beverly said against his hand again, her breath tickling his palm.

“Dummy up, Bev,” he said, and took his hand away.

Her face seemed to be all eyes. Her mouth twitched. “Bill . . . Bill, did you see . . .” Her eyes strayed back to the cricket and then fixed there. The cricket appeared to be dying. Its rugose eyes stared back at her, and presently Beverly began to moan.

“Quh-Quh-Quit that,” he said grimly. “Pull back to the table.”

“I can't, Billy, I can't get near that thi—”

“You can! You
h-have
to!” He heard footsteps, light and quick, coming up the short hall on the other side of the beaded curtain. He looked around at the others. “All of you! Pull up to the table! Talk! Look natural!”

Beverly looked at him, eyes pleading, and Bill shook his head. He sat down and pulled his chair in, trying not to look at the fortune cookie on his plate. It had swelled like some unimaginable boil which was filling with pus. And still it pulsed slowly in and out.
I could have bitten into that,
he thought faintly.

Eddie triggered his aspirator down his throat again, gasping mist into his lungs in a long, thin screaming sound.

“So who do you think's going to win the pennant?” Bill asked Mike, smiling insanely. Rose came through the curtain just then, her face politely questioning. Out of the corner of his eye Bill saw that Bev had pulled up to the table again.
Good girl,
he thought.

“I think the Chicago Bears look good,” Mike said.

“Everything is all right?” Rose asked.

“F-Fine,” Bill said. He cocked a thumb in Eddie's direction. “Our friend had an asthma attack. He took his medication. He's better now.”

Rose looked at Eddie, concerned.

“Better,” Eddie wheezed.

“You would like that I clear now?”

“Very shortly,” Mike said, and offered a large false smile.

“Was good?” Her eyes surveyed the table again, a bit of doubt overlaying a deep well of serenity. She did not see the cricket, the eye, the teeth, or the way Bill's fortune cookie appeared to be breathing. Her eye similarly passed over the bloodstain splotched on the tablecloth without trouble.

“Everything was
very
good,” Beverly said, and smiled—a more natural smile than either Bill's or Mike's. It seemed to set Rose's mind at rest, convinced her that if something had gone wrong in here, it had been the fault of neither Rose's service nor her kitchen.
Girl's got a lot of guts,
Bill thought.

“Fortunes were good?” Rose asked.

“Well,” Richie said, “I don't know about the others, but I for one got a real eyeful.”

Bill heard a minute cracking sound. He looked down at his plate and saw a leg poking blindly out of his fortune cookie. It scraped at his plate.

I could have bitten into that,
he thought again, but held onto his smile. “Very fine,” he said.

Richie was looking at Bill's plate. A great grayish-black fly was slowing birthing itself from the collapsing remains of his cookie. It buzzed weakly. Yellowish goo flowed sluggishly out of the cookie and puddled on the tablecloth. There was a smell now, the bland thick smell of an infected wound.