Stephen King - It

“C-C-Call the uh-others,” he said again. “We’ll s-s-see what they th-think”

“All right.”

She called Richie first, then Ben. Both agreed to come right away. Neither asked what had happened. She found Mike’s telephone number in the book and dialed it. There was no answer; after a dozen rings she hung up.

“T-T-Try the luh-luh-hibrary,” Bill said. He had taken the short curtain rods down from the smaller of the two windows in Eddie’s room and was binding them firmly to Eddie’s arm with the belt of his bathrobe and the drawstring from his pyjamas.

Before she could find the number there was a knock at the door. Ben and Richie had arrived together, Ben in jeans and an untucked shirt, Richie in a pair of smart gray cotton trousers and his pyjama top. His eyes looked warily around the room from behind his glasses.

“Christ, Eddie, what happened to-”

^Oh my God!” Ben cried. He had seen Henry on the floor.

“B-B-Be quh-hiet!” Bill said sharply. “And close th-the d-door!”

Richie did it, his eyes fixed on the body. “Henry?”

Ben took three steps toward the corpse and then stopped, as if afraid it might bite him. He looked helplessly at Bill.

Y-Y-You t-tell,” he said to Eddie. “G-G-Goddam stuh-huh-hutter is g-getting wuh-wuh-worse all the t-t-time.” Eddie sketched in what had happened while Beverly hunted up the number for the Derry Public Library and called it. She expected that perhaps Mike had fallen asleep there-he might even have a bunk in his office. What she did not expect was what happened: the phone was picked up on the second ring and a voice she had never heard before said hello.

“Hello,” she answered, looking toward the others and making a shushing gesture with one hand. “Is Mr Hanlon there?”

“Who’s this?” the voice asked.

She wet her lips with her tongue. Bill was looking at her piercingly. Ben and Richie had looked around. The beginnings of real alarm stirred inside her.

“Who are you?” she countered. “You’re not Mr Hanlon.”

“I’m Derry Chief of Police Andrew Rademacher,” the voice said. “Mr Hanlon is at the Derry Home Hospital right now. He was assaulted and badly wounded a short time ago. Now who are you, please? I want your name.”

But she barely heard this last. Waves of shock rode through her, lifting her dizzily up and up, outside of herself. The muscles in her stomach and legs and crotch all went loose and numb, and she thought in a detached way: This must be how it happens, when people get so scared they wet their pants. Sure. You just lose control of those muscles -

’How badly has he been hurt?” she heard herself asking in a papery voice, and then Bill was beside her, his hand on her shoulder, and Ben was there, and Richie, and she felt such a rush of gratitude for them. She held her free hand out and Bill took it. Richie placed his hand over Bill’s and Ben put his over Richie’s. Eddie had come over, and now he put his good hand on top.

“I want your name, please,” Rademacher said briskly, and for a moment the skittering little craven inside of her, the one that had been bred by her father and cared for by her husband, almost answered: I’m Beverly Marsh and I’m at the Derry Town House. Please send Mr Nell over. There’s a dead man here who’s still half a boy and we’re all very frightened.

She said: “I… I’m afraid I can’t tell you. Not just yet.”

“What do you know about this?”

“Nothing,” she said, shocked. “What makes you think I do? Jesus Christ!”

“You just make a habit of calling the library every morning about three-thirty,” Rademacher said, “is that it? Can the bullshit, young lady. This is assault, and the way the guy looks, it could be murder by the time the sun comes up. I’ll ask you again: who are you and how much do you know about this?”

Closing her eyes, gripping Bill’s hand with all her strength, she asked again: “He might die? You’re not just saying that to scare me? He really might die? Please tell me.”

“He’s very badly hurt. And if that doesn’t scare you, miss, it ought to. Now I want to know who you are and why-”

As if in a dream she watched her hand float through space and drop the phone back into the cradle. She looked over at Henry and felt shock as keen as a slap from a cold hand. One of Henry’s eyes had closed. The other one, the shattered one, oozed as nakedly as before.

Henry seemed to be winking at her.

Richie called the hospital. Bill led Beverly over to the bed, where she sat with Eddie, looking off into space. She thought she would cry, but no tears came. The only feeling she was strongly and immediately aware of was a wish that someone would cover Henry Bowers. That winky look was really not cool at all.

In one giddy instant Richie became a reporter from the Derry News. He understood that Mr Michael Hanlon, the town’s head librarian, had been assaulted while working late. Did the hospital have any word on Mr Hanlon’s condition?

Richie listened, nodding.

“I understand, Mr Kerpaskian-do you spell that with two k’s? You do. Okay. And you are-”

He listened, now enough into his own fiction to make doodling motions with one finger, as if writing on a pad.

“Uh-huh… uh-huh… yes. Yes, I understand. Well, what we usually do in cases like this is to quote you as “a source.” Then, later on, we can… uh-huh… right! Just right!” Richie laughed heartily and armed a film of sweat from his forehead. He listened again. “Okay, Mr Kerpaskian. Yes. I’ll… yes, I got it, K-E-R-P-A-S-K-I-A-N, right! Czech-Jewish, is it? Really! That’s… that’s most unusual. Yes, I will. Goodnight. Thank you.”

He hung up and closed his eyes. “Jesus!” he cried in a thick, low voice. “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” He made as if to shove the phone off the table and then simply let his hand fall. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his pyjama top.

“He’s alive, but in grave condition,” he told the others. “Henry sliced him up like a Christmas turkey. One of the cuts chopped into his femoral artery and he’s lost all the blood a man can and still stay alive. Mike managed to get some kind of tourniquet on it, or he would have been dead when they found him.”

Beverly began to cry. She did it like a child, with both hands plastered to her face. For a little while her hitching sobs and the rapid whistle of Eddie’s breathing were the only sounds in the room.

“Mike wasn’t the only one who got sliced up like a Christmas turkey,” Eddie said at last. “Henry looked like he just went twelve rounds with Rocky Balboa in a Cuisinart.”

“D-Do you still w-w-want to g-g-go to the p-p-police, Bev?”

There were Kleenex on the nighttable but they were a caked and sodden mass in the middle of a puddle of Perrier. She went into the bathroom, making a wide circle around Henry, got a wash-cloth, and ran cool water on it. It felt delicious against her hot puffy face. She felt that she could think clearly again-not rationally but clearly. She was suddenly sure that rationality would kill them if they tried to use it now. That cop. Rademacher. He had been suspicious. Why not? People didn’t call the library at three-thirty in the morning. He had assumed some guilty knowledge. What would he assume if he found out that she had called him from a room where there was a dead man on the floor with a jagged bottle-neck planted in his guts? That she and four other strangers had just come into town the day before for a little reunion and this guy just happened to drop by? Would she buy the tale if the shoe were on the other foot? Would anyone? Of course, they could buttress their tale by adding that they had come back to finish the monster that lived in the drains under the city. That would certainly add a convincing note of gritty realism.