It

before the rotting hands shot out from under the porch, clawing at the rosebushes with mindless ferocity, pulling at them, stripping them, printing beads of blood on them.
Eddie shrieked.
The leper was crawling out. It was wearing a clown suit, he saw — a c l o w n s u i t w i t h b i g orange buttons down the front. It saw Eddie and grinned. Its half-mouth dropped open and its tongue lolled out. Eddie shrieked again, but no one could have heard one boy’s breathless shriek under the pounding of the diesel engine in the trainyard. The leper’s tongue had not just dropped from its mouth; it was at least three feet long and had unrolled like a party-favor. It came to an arrow-point which dragged in the dirt. Foam, thick-sticky and yellowish, coursed along it. Bugs crawled over it.
The rosebushes, which had been showing the first touches of spring green when Eddie broke through them, now turned a dead and lacy black.
‘Blowjob,’ the leper whispered, and tottered to its feet.
Eddie raced for his bike. It was the same race as before, only it now had the quality of a nightmare, where you can only move with the most agonizing slowness no matter how hard you try to go fast . . . and in those dreams didn’t you always hear or feel something, some It, gaining on you? Didn’t you always smell Its stinking breath, as Eddie was smelling it now?
For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, it s comfort fatal.
He did not try to mount his bike immediately; he ran with it instead, head down, pushing the handlebars. He felt as if he was drowning, not in water but inside his own chest.
‘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