It

The figure was dressed in what appeared to be a white-silver clown suit. It rippled around him in the polar wind. There were oversized orange shoes on his feet. They matched the pompom buttons which ran down the front of his suit. One hand grasped a bundle of strings which rose to a bright bunch of balloons, and when Ben observed that the balloons were floating in his direction, he felt unreality wash over him more strongly. He closed his eyes, rubbed them, opened them. The balloons still appeared to be floating toward him.
He heard Mr Fazio’s voke in his head. Be careful of de fros’bite, boy.
It had to be a hallucination or a mirage brought on by some weird trick of the weather. There could be a man down there on the ice; he supposed it was even technically possible he could be wearing a clown suit. But the balloons couldn’t be floating toward Ben, into the wind. Yet that was just what they appeared to be doing.
Ben! the clown on the ice called. Ben thought that voice was only in his mind, although it seemed he heard it with his ears. Want a balloon, Ben?
There was something so evil in that voice, so awful, that Ben wanted to run away as fast as he could, but his feet seemed as welded to this sidewalk as the teetertotters in the schoolyard were welded to the ground.
They float, Ben! They all float! Try one and see!
The clown began walking along the ice toward the Canal bridge where Ben stood. Ben watched him come, not moving; he watched as a bird watches an approaching snake. The balloons should have burst in the intense cold, but they did not; they floated above and ahead of the clown when they should have been streaming out behind him, trying to escape back into the Barrens . . . where, some part of Ben’s mind assured him, this creature had come from in the first place.
Now Ben noticed something else.
Although the last of the daylight had struck a rosy glow across the ice of the Canal, the clown cast no shadow. None at all.
You’ll like it here, Ben, the clown said. Now it was close enough so Ben could hear the dud-dud sound its funny shoes made as they advanced over the uneven ice. You’ll like it here,I promise, all the boys and girls I meet like it here because it’s like Pleasure Island in Pinocchio and Never-Never Land in Peter Pan; they never have to grow up and that’s what all the kiddies want! So come on! See the sights, have a balloon, feed the elephants, ride the Chute-the-Chutes! Oh you’II like it and oh Ben how you’II float —
And in spite of his fear, Ben found that part of him did want a balloon. Who in all the world owned a balloon which would float into the wind? Who had even heard of such a thing? Yes . . . he wanted a balloon, and he wanted to see the clown’s face, which was bent down toward the ice, as if to keep it out of that killer wind.
What might have happened if the five o’clock whistle atop the Derry Town Hall hadn’t blown just then Ben didn’t know . . . didn’t want to know. The important thing was that it did blow, an ice-pick of sound drilling into the deep winter cold. The clown looked up, as if startled, and Ben saw its face.
The mummy! Oh my God it’s the mummy! was his first thought, accompanied by a swoony horror that caused him to clamp his hands down viciously on the bridge’s railing to keep from fainting. Of course it hadn’t been the mummy, couldn’t have been the mummy. Oh, there were Egyptian mummies, plenty of them, he knew that, but his first thought had been that it was the mummy — the dusty monster played by Boris Karloff in the old movie he had stayed up late to watch just last month on Shock Theater.
No, it wasn’t that mummy, couldn’t be, movie monsters weren’t real, everyone knew that, even little kids. But —
It wasn’t make-up the clown was wearing. Nor was the clown simply swaddled in a bunch of bandages. There were bandages, most of them around its neck and wrists, blowing back in
the wind, but Ben could see the clown’s face clearly. It was deeply lined, th e skin a parchment map of