'Blowjob,' the leper whispered again. 'Come back anytime, Eddie. Bring your friends.'

Its rotting fingers seemed to touch the back of his neck, but perhaps that was only a dangling strand of cobweb from under the porch, caught in his hair and brushing against his shrinking flesh. Eddie leaped onto his bike and pedaled away, not caring that his throat had closed up tight as Tillie again, not giving two sucks for his asthma, not looking back. He didn't look back until he was almost home, and of course there was nothing behind him when he finally did but two kids headed over to the park to play ball.

That night, lying straight as a poker in bed, one hand folded tightly around his aspirator, looking into the shadows, he heard the leper whisper: It won'tdo you, any good to run, Eddie.

8

'Wow,' Richie said respectfully. It was the first thing any of them had said since Bill Denbrough finished his story.

'H-Have you g-g-got a-another suh-suh –higgarette, R-R-Richie?'

Richie gave him the last one in the pack he had hawked almost empty from his dad's desk drawer. He even lit it for Bill.

'You didn't dream it, Bill?' Stan asked suddenly.

Bill shook his head. 'N-N-No duh-dream.'

'Real,' Eddie said in a low voice.

Bill looked at him sharply. 'Wh-Wh-What?'

'Real, I said.' Eddie looked at him almost resentfully. 'It really happened. It was real.' And before he could stop himself — before he even knew he was going to do it — Eddie found himself telling the story of the leper that had come crawling out of the basement at 29 Neibolt Street. Halfway through the telling he began to gasp and had to use his aspirator. And at the end he burst into shrill tears, his thin body shaking.

They all looked at him uncomfortably, and then Stan put a hand on his back. Bill gave him an awkward hug while the others glanced away, embarrassed.

That's a-all right, E-Eddie. It's o-o-okay.'

'I saw it too,' Ben Hanscom said suddenly. His voice was flat and harsh and scared.

Eddie looked up, his face still naked with tears, his eyes red and raw-looking. 'What?'

'I saw the clown,' Ben said. 'Only he wasn't like you said — at least not when I saw him. He wasn't all gooshy. He was . . . he was dry.' He paused, ducked his head, and looked at his hands, which lay palely on his elephantine thighs. 'I think he was the mummy.'

'Like in the movies?' Eddie asked.

'Like that but not like that,' Ben said slowly. 'In the movies he looks fake. It's scary, but you can tell it's a put-up job, you know? All those bandages, they look too neat, or something. But this guy . . . he looked the way a real mummy would look, I think. If you actually found one in a room under a pyramid, I mean. Except for the suit.'

'Wuh-wuh-wuh-hut suh-hoot?'

Ben looked at Eddie. 'A silver suit with big orange buttons down the front.'

Eddie's mouth dropped open. He shut it and said, 'If you're kidding, say so. I still . . . I still dream about that guy under the porch.'

'It's not a joke,' Ben said, and began to tell the story. He told it slowly, beginning with his volunteering to help Mrs Douglas count and store books and ending with his own bad dreams. He spoke slowly, not looking at the others. He spoke as if deeply ashamed of his own behavior. He didn't raise his head again until the story was over.

'You must have dreamed it,' Richie said finally. He saw Ben wince and hurried on: 'Now don't take it personal, Big Ben, but you got to see that balloons can't, like, float against the wind — '

'Pictures can't wink, either,' Ben said.

Richie looked from Ben to Bill, troubled. Accusing Ben of dreaming awake was one thing; accusing Bill was something else. Bill was their leader, the guy they all looked up to. No one said so out loud; no one needed to. But Bill was the idea man, the guy who could think of something to do on a boring day, the guy who remembered games the others had forgotten. And in some odd way they all sensed something comfortingly adult about Bill — perhaps it was a sense of accountability, a feeling that Bill would take the responsibility if responsi b i l i t y needed to be taken. The truth was, Richie believed Bill's story, crazy as it was. And perhaps he didn't want to believe Ben's . . . or Eddie's, for that matter.

'Nothing like that ever happened to you, huh?' Eddie asked Richie.

Richie paused, began to say something, shook his head, paused again, then said: 'Scariest thing I've seen lately was Mark Prenderlist takin a leak in McCarron Park. Ugliest hogger you ever saw.'

Ben said, 'What about you, Stan?'

'No,' Stan said quickly, and lo oked somewhere else. His small face was pale, his lips pressed together so tightly they were white.

'W-W-Was there suh-homething, S-St-Stan?' Bill asked.

'No, I told you!' Stan got to his feet and walked to the embankment, hands in his pockets. He stood watching the water course over the top of the original dam and pile up behind the second Watergate.

'Come on, now, Stanley!' Richie said in a shrill falsetto. This was another of his Voices: Granny Grunt. When speaking in his Granny Grunt Voice, Richie would hobble around with one fist against the small of his back, and cackle a lot. He still, however, sounded more like Richie Tozier than anyone else.

'Fess up, Stanley, tell your old Granny about the baaaaad clown and I'll give you a chocker-chip cookie. You just tell — '

'Shut up!' Stan yelled suddenly, whirling on Richie, who fell back a step or two, astonished. 'Just shut up!'

'Yowza, boss,' Richie said, and sat down. He looked at Stan Uris mistrust fully. Bright spots of color flame d in Stan's cheeks, but he still looked more scared than mad.

'That's okay,' Eddie said quietly. 'Never mind, Stan.'

'It wasn't a clown,' Stanley said. His eyes flicked from one of them to the next to the next to the next. He seemed to struggle with himself.

'Y-Y-You can t-tell,' Bill said, also speaking quietly. 'W –We d-d-did.'

'It wasn't a clown. It was — '

Which was when the carrying, whiskey– roughened tones of Mr Nell interrup ted, making them all jump as if they had been shot: 'Jay-sus Christ on a jumped-up chariot-driven crutch! Look at this mess! Jaysus Christ!'

CHAPTER 8

Georgie's Room and the House on Neibolt Street

1

Richard Tozier turns off the radio, which has been blaring out Madonna's 'Like a Virgin' on WZON (a station which declares itself to be 'Banger's AM stereo rocker!' with a kind of hysterical frequency), pulls over to the side of the road, shuts down the engine of the Mustang the Avis people rented him at Bangor International, and gets out. He hears the pull and release of his own breath in his ears. He has seen a sign which has caused the flesh of his back to break out in hard ridges of gooseflesh.

He walks to the front of the car and puts one hand on its hood. He hears the engine ticking softly to itself as it cools. He hears a jay scream briefly and then shut up. There are crickets. And as far as the soundtrack goes, that's it.

He has seen the sign, he passes it, and suddenly he is in Derry again. After twenty-five years Richie 'Trashmouth' Tozier has come home. He has —

Burning agony suddenly needles into his eyes, breaking his thought cleanly off. He utters a strangled little shout and his hands fly up to his face. The only time he felt anything even remotely like this burning pain was when he got an eyelash caught under one of his contacts in college — and that was only in one eye. This terrible pain is in both.

Before he can reach even halfway to his face, the pain is gone.

He lowers his hands again slowly, thoughtfully, and looks down Route 7. He left the turnpike at the Etna-Haven exit, wanting, for some reason he doesn't understand, not to come in by the turnpike, which was still under construction in the Derry area when he and his folks shook the dust of this weird little town from their heels and headed out for the Midwest. No — the turnpike would have been quicker, but it would have been wrong.