Stephen King - It

“B-B-But wh-wh-where does the pih-hicture fit i-i-in?”

“What do you think, Billy?”

In a low voice, not looking at Richie, Bill said he didn’t think it had anything to do with the murders. “I think it was Juh-Juh-Georgie’s g-ghost.”

“A ghost in a picture?” Bill nodded.

Richie thought about it. The idea of ghosts gave his child’s mind no trouble at all. He was sure there were such things. His parents were Methodists, and Richie went to church every Sunday and to Thursday-night Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings as well. He knew a great deal of the Bible already, and he knew the Bible believed in all sorts of weird stuff. According to the Bible, God Himself was at least one-third Ghost, and that was just the beginning. You could tell the Bible believed in demons, because Jesus threw a bunch of them out of this guy. Real chuckalicious ones, too. When Jesus asked the guy who had them what his name was, the demons answered and told Him to go join the Foreign Legion. Or something like that. The Bible believed in witches, or else why would it say “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live’? Some of the stuff in the Bible was even better than the stuff in the horror comics. People getting boiled in oil or hanging themselves like Judas Iscariot; the story about how wicked King Ahaz fell off the tower and all the dogs came and licked up his blood; the mass baby-murders that had accompanied the births of both Moses and Jesus Christ; guys who came out of their graves or flew into the air; soldiers who witched down walls; prophets who saw the future and fought monsters. All of that was in the Bible and every word of it was true-so said Reverend Craig and so said Richie’s folks and so said Richie. He was perfectly willing to credit the possibility of Bill’s explanation; it was the logic which troubled him.

“But you said you were scared. Why would George’s ghost want to scare you, Bill?”

Bill put a hand to his mouth and wiped it. The hand was trembling slightly. “H-He’s probably muh-muh-mad at m-m-me. For g-getting him kin-hilled. It was my fuh-fuh-fault. I s-sent him out with the buh-buh-buh-” He was incapable of getting the word out, so he rocked his hand in the air instead. Richie nodded to show he understood what Bill meant… but not to indicate agreement.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “If you stabbed him in the back or shot him, that would be different. Or even if you, like, gave him a loaded gun that belonged to your dad to play with and he shot himself with it. But it wasn’t a gun, it was just a boat. You didn’t want to hurt him; in fact’-Richie raised one finger and waggled it at Bill in a lawyerly way-’you just wanted the kid to have a little fun, right?”

Bill thought back-thought desperately hard. What Richie had just said had made him feel better about George’s death for the first time in months, but there was a part of him which insisted with quiet firmness that he was not supposed to feel better. Of course it was your fault, that part of him insisted; not entirely, maybe, but at least partly.

If not, how come there’s that cold place on the couch between your mother and father? If not, how come no one ever says anything at the supper table anymore? Now it’s just knives and forks rattling until you can’t take it anymore and ask if you can be eh-eh-eh-excused, please.

It was as if he were the ghost, a presence that spoke and moved but was not quite heard or seen, a thing vaguely sensed but still not accepted as real.

He did not like the thought that he was to blame, but the only alternative he could think of to explain their behavior was much worse: that all the love and attention his parents had given him before had somehow been the result of George’s presence, and with George gone there was nothing for him… and all of that had happened at random, for no reason at all. And if you put your ear to that door, you could hear the winds of madness blowing outside.

So he went over what he had done and felt and said on the day Georgie had died, part of him hoping that what Richie had said was true, part of him hoping just as hard it was not. He hadn’t been a saint of a big brother to George, that much was certain. They had had fights, plenty of them. Surely there had been one that day?

No. No fight. For one thing, Bill himself had still been feeling too punk to work up a really good quarrel with George. He had been sleeping, dreaming something, dreaming about some

(turtle)

funny little animal, he couldn’t remember just what, and he had awakened to the sound of the diminishing rain outside and George muttering unhappily to himself in the dining room. He asked George what was wrong. George came in and said he was trying to make a paper boat from the directions in his Best Book of Activities but it kept coming out wrong. Bill told George to bring his book. And sitting next to Richie on the steps leading up to the seminary, he remembered how Georgie’s eyes lit up when the paper boat came out right, and how good that look had made him feel, like Georgie thought he was a real hot shit, a straight shooter, the guy who could do it until it got done. Making him feel, in short, like a big brother.

The boat had killed George, but Richie was right-it hadn’t been like handing George a loaded gun to play with. Bill hadn’t known what was going to happen. No way he could.

He drew a deep, shuddering breath, feeling something like a rock-something he hadn’t even known was there-go rolling off his chest. All at once he felt better, better about everything.

He opened his mouth to tell Richie this and burst into tears instead.

Alarmed, Richie put an arm around Bill’s shoulders (after taking a quick glance around to make sure no one who might mistake them for a couple of fagolas was looking).

“You’re okay,” he said. “You’re okay, Billy, right? Come on. Turn off the waterworks.”

“I didn’t wuh-wuh-want h-him t-to g-g-get kuh-hilled!” Bill sobbed. “TH-THAT WUH-WUH-WASN’T ON MY M-M-M-MIND AT UH-UH-ALL!”

“Christ, Billy, I know it wasn’t,” Richie said. “If you’d wanted to scrub him, you woulda pushed him downstairs or something.” Richie patted Bill’s shoulder clumsily and gave him a hard little hug before letting go. “Come on, quit bawlin, okay? You sound like a baby.”

Little by little Bill stopped. He still hurt, but this hurt seemed cleaner, as if he had cut himself open and taken out something that was rotting inside him. And that feeling of relief was still there.

“I-I didn’t w-want him to get kuh-kuh-killed,” Bill repeated, “and ih-if y-y-you t-tell anybody I w-was c-c-cryin, I’ll b-b-bust your n-n-nose.

“I won’t tell,” Richie said, “don’t worry. He was your brother, for gosh sake. If my brother got killed, I’d cry my fuckin head off.”

“Yuh-Yuh-You d-don’t have a buh-brother.”

“Yeah, but if I did.”

“Y-You w-w-would?”

“Course.” Richie paused, fixing Bill with a wary eye, trying to decide if Bill was really over it. He was still wiping his red eyes with his snotrag, but Richie decided he probably was. “All I meant was that I don’t know why George would want to haunt you. So maybe the picture’s got something to do with… well, with that other. The clown.”

“Muh-Muh-Maybe G-G-George d-d-doesn’t nuh-nuh-know. Maybe h-he th-thinks-”

Richie understood what Bill was trying to say and waved it aside. “After you croak you know everything people ever thought about you, Big Bill.” He spoke with the indulgent air of a great teacher correcting a country bumpkin’s fatuous ideas. “It’s in the Bible. It says, “Yea, even though we can’t see too much in the mirror right now, we will see through it like it was a window after we die.” That’s in First Thessalonians or Second Babylonians, I forget which. It means-”