Stephen King - It

Bill shook him off. He flipped through the pages, and there was a grim determination on his face that scared Richie more than anything else. Bill’s eyes looked almost mad. His wounded fingers printed George’s album with new blood-it didn’t look like ketchup yet, but when it had a little time to dry it would. Of course it would.

And here was the downtown scene again.

The Model-T stood in the middle of the intersection. The other cars were frozen in the places where they had been before. The man walking toward the intersection held the brim of his fedora; his coat once more belled out in mid-flap.

The two boys were gone.

There were no boys in the picture anywhere. But-

“Look,” Richie whispered, and pointed. He was careful to keep the tip of his finger well away from the picture. An arc showed just over the low concrete wall at the edge of the Canal-the top of something round.

Something like a balloon.

They got out of George’s room just in time. Bill’s mother was a voice at the foot of the stairs and a shadow on the wall. “Have you boys been wrestling?” she asked sharply. “I heard a thud.”

“Just a lih-lih-little, M-Mom.” Bill threw a sharp glance at Richie. Be quiet, it said.

“Well, I want you to stop it. I thought the ceiling was going to come right down on my head.”

“W-W-We will.”

They heard her go back toward the front of the house. Bill had wrapped his handkerchief around his bleeding hand; it was turning red and in a moment would start to drip. The boys went down to the bathroom, where Bill held his hand under the faucet until the bleeding stopped. Cleaned, the cuts looked thin but cruelly deep. Looking at their white lips and the red meat just inside them made Richie feel sick to his stomach. He wrapped them with Band-Aids as fast as he could.

“H-H-Hurts like hell,” Bill said.

“Well, why’d you want to go and put your hand in there, you wet end?”

Bill looked solemnly at the rings of Band-Aids on his fingers, then up at Richie. “I-I-It was the cluh-hown,” he said. “It w-w-was the c-clown pretending to be Juh-Juh-George.”

“That’s right,” Richie said. “Like it was the clown pretending to be the mummy when Ben saw it. Like it was the clown pretending to be that sick bum Eddie saw.”

“The luh-luh-leper.”

“Right.”

“But ih-is it r-r-really a cluh-cluh-clown?”

“It’s a monster,” Richie said flatly. “some kind of monster. Some kind of monster right here in Derry. And it’s killing kids.”

On a Saturday, not long after the incident of the dam in the Barrens, Mr Nell, and the picture that moved, Richie, Ben, and Beverly Marsh came face to face with not one monster but two-and they paid to do it. Richie did, anyway. These monsters were scary but not really dangerous; they stalked their victims on the screen of the Aladdin Theater while Richie, Ben, and Bev watched from the balcony.

One of the monsters was a werewolf, played by Michael Landon, and he was cool because even when he was the werewolf he still had sort of a duck’s ass haircut. The other was this smashed-up hotrodder, played by Gary Conway. He was brought back to life by a descendant of Victor Frankenstein, who fed all parts he didn’t need to a bunch of alligators he kept in the basement. Also on the program: a MovieTone Newsreel that showed the latest Paris fashions and the latest Vanguard rocket explosions at Cape Canaveral, two Warner Brothers cartoons, one Popeye cartoon, and a Chilly Willy cartoon (for some reason the hat Chilly Willy wore always cracked Richie up), and PREVUES OF COMING ATTRACTIONS. The coming attractions included two pictures Richie immediately put on his gotta-see list: I Married a Monster from Outer Space and The Blob.

Ben was very quiet during the show. Ole Haystack had nearly been spotted by Henry, Belch, and Victor earlier, and Richie assumed that was all that was troubling him. Ben, however, had forgotten all about the creeps (they were sitting close to the screen down below, chucking popcorn boxes at each other and hooting). Beverly was the reason for his silence. Her nearness was so overwhelming that he was almost ill with it. His body would break out in goosebumps and then, if she should so much as shift in her seat, his skin would flash hot, as if with a tropical fever. When her hand brushed his reaching for the popcorn, he trembled with exaltation. He thought later that those three hours in the dark next to Beverly had been both the longest and shortest hours of his life.

Richie, unaware that Ben was in deep throes of calf-love, was feeling just as fine as paint. In his book the only thing any better than a couple of Francis the Talking Mule pictures was a couple of horror pictures in a theater filled with kids, all of them yelling and screaming at the gory parts. He certainly did not connect any of the goings-ons in the two low-budget American-International pictures they were watching with what was going on in town… not then, at least.

He had seen the Twin Shock Show Saturday Matinee ad in the News on Friday morning and had almost immediately forgotten how badly he had slept the night before-and how he had finally gotten up and turned on the light in his closet, a real baby trick for sure, but he hadn’t been able to get a wink of sleep until he’d done it. But by the following morning things had seemed normal again… well, almost. He began to think that maybe he and Bill had just shared a hallucination. Of course the cuts on Bill’s fingers weren’t a hallucination, but maybe they’d just been paper-cuts from some of the sheets in Georgie’s album. Pretty thick paper. Could of been. Maybe. Besides, there was no law saying he had to spend the next ten years thinking about it, was there? Nope.

And so, following an experience that might well have sent an adult running for the nearest headshrinker, Richie Tozier got up, ate a giant pancake breakfast, saw the ad for the two horror movies on the Amusements page of the paper, checked his funds, found them a little low (well… “nonexistent” might actually have been a better word), and began to pester his father for chores.

His dad, who had come to the table already wearing his white dentist’s tunic, put down the Sports pages and poured himself a second cup of coffee. He was a pleasant-looking man with a rather thin face. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles, was developing a bald spot at the back of his head, and would die of cancer of the larynx in 1973. He looked at the ad to which Richie was pointing.

“Horror movies,” Wentworth Tozier said.

“Yeah,” Richie said, grinning.

“Feel like you have to go,” Wentworth Tozier said.

“Yeah!”

“Feel like you’ll probably die in convulsions of disappointment if you don’t get to see those two trashy movies.”

“Yeah, yeah, I would! I know I would! Graaaag!” Richie fell out of his chair onto the floor, clutching his throat, his tongue sticking out. This was Richie’s admittedly peculiar way of turning on the charm.

“Oh God, Richie, will you please stop it?” his mother asked him from the stove, where she was frying him a couple of eggs to top off the pancakes.

“Gee, Rich,” his father said as Richie got back into his chair. “I guess I must have forgotten to pay you your allowance on Monday. That’s the only reason I can think of for you needing more money on Friday.”

“Well…”

“Gone?”

“Well…”

“That’s an extremely deep subject for a boy with such a shallow mind,” Wentworth Tozier said. He put his elbow on the table and then cupped his chin on the palm of his hand, regarding his only son with what appeared to be deep fascination. “Where’d it go?”