Stephen King - It

He clutched it with feverish strength and stared into the shadowy hallway.

There was another step… another. Now the ragged denim pants were visible up to the knees. He could see the shape these lower legs belonged to: it was big, hulking. The shoulders were rounded. There was a suggestion of ragged hair. The figure was ape-like.

“Who are you?”

There was no answer. The shape merely stood there, contemplating him.

Although still afraid, Mike had gotten over the debilitating idea that it might be Stan Uris, returned from the grave, called back by the scars on his palms, some eldritch magnetism which had brought him back like a zombie in a Hammer horror film. Whoever this was, it wasn’t Stan Uris, who had finished at five-seven when he had his full growth.

The shape took another step, and now the light from the globe closest to the passageway fell across the beltless loops of the jeans around the shape’s waist.

Suddenly Mike knew. Even before the shape spoke, he knew.

“Why, it’s the nigger,” the shape said. “Been throwing rocks at anyone, nigger? Want to know who poisoned your fucking dog?”

The shape stepped forward. The light fell on the face of Henry Bowers. It had grown fat and sagging; the skin had an unhealthy tallowy hue; the cheeks had become hanging jowls that were specked with stubble, almost as much white in that stubble as black. Wavy lines-three of them-were engraved in the shelf of the forehead above the bushy brows. Other lines formed parentheses at the corners of the full-lipped mouth. The eyes were small and mean inside discolored pouches of flesh-bloodshot and thoughtless. It was the face of a man being pushed into a premature age, a man who was thirty-nine going on seventy-three. But it was also the face of a twelve-year-old boy. Henry’s clothes were still green with whatever bushes he had spent the day hiding in.

“Ain’t you ganna say howdy, nigger?” Henry asked.

“Hellow, Henry.” It occurred to him dimly that he had not listened to the radio for the last two days, and he had not even read the paper, which was a ritual with him. Too much going on. Too busy.

Too bad.

Henry emerged from the corridor between the Children’s Library and the adult library and stood there, peering at Mike with his piggy little eyes. His lips parted in an unspeakable grin, revealing rotted back-Maine teeth.

“Voices,” he said. “You hear voices, nigger?”

“Which voices are those, Henry?” He put both hands behind his back, like a schoolboy called upon to recite, and transferred the letter-opener from his left hand to his right. The grandfather clock, given by Horst Mueller in 1923, ticked solemn seconds into the smooth pond of library silence.

“From the moon,” Henry said. He put a hand in his pocket. “Came from the moon. Lots of voices.” He paused, frowned slightly, then shook his head. “Lots but really only one. It’s voice.”

“Did you see It, Henry?”

“Yep,” Henry said. “Frankenstein. Tore off Victor’s head. You should have heard it. Made a sound like a great big zipper going down. Then It went after Belch. Belch fought It.”

“Did he?”

“Yep. That’s how I got away.”

“You left him to die.”

“Don’t you say that!” Henry’s cheeks flushed a dull red. He took two steps forward. The farther he walked from the umbilicus connecting the Children’s Library to the adult library, the younger he looked to Mike. He saw the same old meanness in Henry’s face, but he saw something else as well: the child who had been brought up by crazy Butch Bowers on a good farm that had gone to shitshack shambles over the years. “don’t you say that! It would have killed me, too.”

“It didn’t kill us.”

Henry’s eyes gleamed with rancid humor. “Not yet. But It will. “Less I don’t leave any of you for It to get,” He pulled his hand out of his pocket. In it was a slim nine-inch-long instrument with imitation-ivory inlay along its sides. A small chromium button glittered at one end of this dubious objet d’art. Henry pushed it. A six-inch steel blade popped out of the slit at the end of the handle. He bounced the switchblade on his palm and began to walk toward the checkout desk a little faster.

“Look what I found,” he said. “I knew where to look.” Obscenely, one red-rimmed eyelid drooped in a wink. “The man in the moon told me.” Henry revealed his teeth again. “Hid today. Hitchhiked a ride tonight. Old man. Hit him. Killed him, I think. Ditched the car over in Newport. Just over the Derry town line, I heard that voice. I looked in a drain. There was these clothes. And the knife. My old knife.”

“You’re forgetting something, Henry.”

Henry, grinning, only shook his head.

“We got away and you got away. If It wants us, It wants you too.”

“No.”

“I think yes. Maybe you yo-yos did Its work, but It didn’t exactly play favorites, did It? It got both of your friends, and while Belch was fighting It, you got away. But now you’re back. I think you’re part of Its unfinished business, Henry. I really do.”

“No!”

“Maybe Frankenstein’s what you’ll see. Or the Werewolf? A Vampire. The Clown, Or Henry! Maybe you’ll really see what It looks like, Henry. We did. Want me to tell you? Want me to-”

“You shut up!” Henry screamed, and launched himself at Mike.

Mike stepped aside and stuck out one foot. Henry tripped over it and went skidding over the footworn tiles like a shuffleboard weight. His head struck a leg of the table where the Losers had sat earlier that night, telling their tales. For a moment he was stunned; the knife hung loose in his hand.

Mike went after him, went after the knife. In that moment he could have finished Henry; it would have been possible to have planted the JESUS SAVES letter-opener which had come in the mail from his mother’s old church in the back of Henry’s neck and then called the police. There would have been a certain amount of official nonsense, but not too much of it-not in Derry, where such weird and violent events were not entirely exceptional.

What stopped him was a realization, almost too lightninglike to be conscious, that if he killed Henry, he would be doing Its work as surely as Henry would be doing Its work by killing Mike. And something else; that other look he had seen on Henry’s face, the tired, bewildered look of the badly used child who has been set on a poisonous path for some unknown purpose. Henry had grown up within the contaminated radius of Butch Bowers’s mind; surely he had belonged to It even before he suspected it existed.

So instead of planting the letter-opener in Henry’s vulnerable neck, he dropped to his knees and snatched at the knife. It twisted in his hand-seemingly of its own volition-and his ringers closed on the blade. There was no immediate pain; only red blood flowing down the first three fingers of his right hand and into his scarred palm.

He pulled back. Henry rolled away and grabbed the knife again. Mike got to his knees and the two of them faced each other that way, each bleeding: Mike’s fingers, Henry’s nose. Henry shook his head and droplets flew away into the darkness.

“Thought you were so smart!” he cried hoarsely. “Fucking sissies is all you were! We could have beat you in a fair fight!”

“Put the knife down, Henry,” Mike said quietly. “I’ll call the police. They’ll come and get you and take you back to Juniper Hill. You’ll be out of Derry. You’ll be safe.”

Henry tried to talk and couldn’t. He couldn’t tell this hateful jig that he wouldn’t be safe in Juniper Hill, or Los Angeles, or the rainforests of Timbuktu. Sooner or later the moon would rise, bone-white and snow-cold, and the ghost-voices would start, and the face of the moon would change into Its face, babbling and laughing and ordering. He swallowed slick-slimy blood.