Stephen King - It

And then he tried to think about the chores, the whole chores, and nothing but the chores. After awhile he actually succeeded.

And when he saw the headline in the paper the next day (MISSING BOY PROMPTS NEW FEARS), he thought about the pocket knife he had thrown into the Canal-the pocket knife with the initials EC scratched on the side. He thought about the blood he had seen on the grass.

And he thought about those grooves which stopped at the edge of the Canal.

Seen from the expressway at quarter to five in the morning, Boston seems a city of the dead brooding over some tragedy in its past-a plague, perhaps, or a curse. The smell of salt, heavy and cloying, comes off the ocean. Runners of early-morning fog obscure much of what movement would be seen otherwise.

Driving north along Storrow Drive, sitting behind the wheel of the black ’84 Cadillac he picked up from Butch Carrington at Cape Cod Limousine, Eddie Kaspbrak thinks you can feel this city’s age; perhaps you can get that feeling of age nowhere else in America but here. Boston is a sprat compared with London, an infant compared with Rome, but by American standards at least it is old, old. It kept its place on these low hills three hundred years ago, when the Tea and Stamp Taxes were unthought of, Paul Revere and Patrick Henry unborn.

Its age, its silence, and the foggy smell of the sea-all of these things make Eddie nervous. When Eddie’s nervous he reaches for his aspirator. He sticks it in his mouth and triggers a cloud of revivifying spray down his throat.

There are a few people in the streets he’s passing, and a pedestrian or two on the walkways of the overpasses-they give lie to the impression that he has somehow wandered into a Lovecrafty tale of doomed cities, ancient evils, and monsters with unpronounceable names. Here, ganged around a bus stop with a sign reading KENMORE SQUARE CITY CENTER, he sees waitresses, nurses, city employees, their faces naked and puffed with sleep.

That’s right, Eddie thinks, now passing under a sign which reads TOBIN BRIDGE. That’s right, stick to the buses. Forget the subways. The subways are a bad idea; I wouldn’t go down there if I were you. Not down below. Not in the tunnels.

This is a bad thought to have; if he doesn’t get rid of it he will soon be using the aspirator again. He’s glad for the heavier traffic on the Tobin Bridge. He passes a monument works. Painted on the brick side is a slightly unsettling admonishment:

Here is a green reflectorized sign which reads TO 95 MAINE, N.H… ALL NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND POINTS. He looks at it and suddenly a bone-deep shudder wracks his body. His hands momentarily weld themselves to the wheel of the Cadillac. He would like to believe it is the onset of some sickness, a virus or perhaps one of his mother’s “phantom fevers,” but he knows better. It is the city behind him, poised silently on the straight-edge that runs between day and night, and what that sign promises ahead of him. He’s sick, all right, no doubt about that, but it’s not a virus or a phantom fever. He has been poisoned by his own memories.

I’m scared, Eddie thinks. That was always what was at the bottom of it. Just being scared. That was everything. But in the end I think we turned that around somehow. We used it. But how?

He can’t remember. He wonders if any of the others can. For all their sakes he certainly hopes so.

A truck drones by on his left. Eddie has still got his lights on and now he hits his brights momentarily as the truck draws safely ahead. He does this without thinking. It has become an automatic function, just part of driving for a living. The unseen driver in the truck flashes his running lights in return, quickly, twice, thanking Eddie for his courtesy. If only everything could be that simple and that clear, he thinks. He follows the signs to I-95. The northbound traffic is light, although he observes that the southbound lanes into the city are starting to fill up, even at this early hour. Eddie floats the big car along, pre-guessing most of the directional signs and getting into the correct lane long before he has to. It has been years-literally years-since he has guessed wrong enough to be swept past an exit he wanted. He makes his lane-choices as automatically as he flashed “okay to cut back in” to the trucker, as automatically as he once found his way through the tangle of paths in the Derry Barrens. The fact that he has never before in his life driven out of downtown Boston, one of the most confusing cities in America to drive in, does not seem to matter much at all.

He suddenly remembers something else about that summer, something Bill said to him one day: “Y-You’ve g-got a c-c-cuh-hompass in your head, E-E-Eddie.”

How that had pleased him! It pleases him again as the ’84 “dorado shoots back onto the turnpike. He slides the limo’s speed up to a cop-safe fifty-seven miles an hour and finds some quiet music on the radio. He supposes he would have died for Bill back then, if that had been required; if Bill had asked him, Eddie would simply have responded: “sure, Big Bill… you got a time in mind yet?”

Eddie laughs at this-not much of a sound, just a snort, but the sound of it startles him into a real laugh. He laughs seldom these days, and he certainly did not expect to find many chucks (Richie’s word, meaning chuckles, as in “You had any good chucks today, Eds?’) on this black pilgrimage. But, he supposes, if God is dirty-mean enough to curse the faithful with what they want most in life, He’s maybe quirky enough to deal you a good chuck or two along the way.

“Had any good chucks lately, Eds?” he says out loud, and laughs again. Man, he had hated it when Richie called him Eds… but he had sort of liked it, too. The way he thought Ben Hanscom got to like Richie calling him Haystack. It was something… like a secret name. A secret identity. A way to be people that had nothing to do with their parents” fears, hopes, constant demands. Richie couldn’t do his beloved Voices for shit, but maybe he did know how important it was for creeps like them to sometimes be different people.

Eddie glances at the change lined up neatly on the “dorado’s dashboard-lining up the change is another of those automatic tricks of the trade. When the tollbooths come up, you never want to have to dig for your silver, never want to find that you’ve gotten in an automatic-toll lane with the wrong change.

Among the coins are two or three Susan B. Anthony silver dollars. They are coins, he reflects, that you probably only find in the pockets of chauffeurs and taxi-drivers from the New York area these days, just as the only place you are apt to see a lot of two-dollar bills is at a race-track payoff window. He always keeps a few on hand because the robot tolltaker baskets on the George Washington and the Triboro Bridges take them.

Another of those lights suddenly comes on in his head: silver dollars. Not these fake copper sandwiches but real silver dollars, with Lady Liberty dressed in her gauzy robes stamped upon them. Ben Hanscom’s silver dollars. Yes, but wasn’t it Bill who once used one of those silver cartwheels to save their lives? He is not quite sure of this, is, in fact, not quite sure of anything… or is it just that he doesn’t want to remember?

It was dark in there, he thinks suddenly. I remember that much. It was dark

in there.

Boston is well behind him now and the fog is starting to bum off. Ahead is MAINE, N.H… ALL NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND POINTS. Derry is ahead, and there is something in Derry which should be twenty-seven years dead and yet is somehow not. Something with as many faces as Lon Chaney. But what is it really.” Didn’t they see it at the end as it really was, with all its masks cast aside?