It

My mom told me so.’
Eddie looked startled, thinly worried, and then saw Richie’s grin. He withered him (or tried to) with a babies-must-play look and then said, ‘It was too big for us to carry. But Bill said if all of us went down we could get it up here.’
‘Of course, you can never shake off completely,’ Richie went on. ‘You want to know what a wise man once told me, Eds?’
‘No,’ Eddie said, ‘and I don’t want you to call me Eds anymore, Richie. I mean, I’m sincere. I don’t call you Dick, as in «You got any gum on ya, Dick?», so I don’t see why — ‘
‘This wise man,’ Richie said, ‘told me this: «No matter how much you squirm and dance, the last two drops go in your pants.» And that’s why there’s so much cancer in the world, Eddie my love.’
‘The reason there’s so much cancer in the world is because nerds like you and Beverly Marsh smoke cigarettes,’ Eddie said.
‘Beverly is not a nerd,’ Ben said in a forbidding voice. ‘You just watch what you say, Trashmouth.’
‘Beep-beep, you g-guys,’ Bill said absently. ‘And speaking of B-B-Beverly, she’s pretty struh-struh-strong. She could h-h-help get that duh –door.’
Ben asked what kind of door it was.
‘Muh-Muh-hogany, I th-hink.’
‘Somebody threw out a mahogany door?’ Ben asked, surprised but not unbelieving.
‘People throw out everything,’ Mike said. ‘That dump? It kills me to go down there. I mean it kills me.’
‘Yeah,’ Ben agreed. ‘A lot of that stuff could be fixed up easy. A nd there are people in China and South America with nothing. That’s what my mother says.’
‘There’s people with nothing right here in Maine, Sunny Jim,’ Richie said grimly.
‘W-W-What’s th-this?’ Bill asked, noticing the album Mike had brought. Mike told him, saying he would show them the picture of the clown when Stan and Beverly got back with the hinges.
Bill and Richie exchanged a look.
‘What’s wrong?’ Mike asked. ‘Is it what happened in your brother’s room,
‘Bill?’
‘Y-Yeah,’ Bill said, and would say no more.
They took turns working on the hole until Stan and Beverly came back, each with a brown paper bag containing hinges. As Mike talked, Ben sat crosslegged, tailor-fashion, and made glassless windows that would swing open and shut in two of the long boards. Perhaps only Bill noticed how quickly and easily his fingers moved; how adept and knowing they were, like surgeon’s fingers. Bill admired that.
‘Some of these pictures go back a hundred years, my dad said,’ Mike told them, holding the album on his lap. ‘He gets them at those sales people have in their yards, and at secondhand shops. Sometimes he buys them or trades other collectors for them. Some of them are stereoscopes — there’s two of them just the same on a long card, an d when you look at them through this thing like binoculars, it looks like one picture, only in 3-D. Like House of Wax or The Creature from the Black Lagoon.’
‘Why does he like all that stuff?’ Beverly asked. She was wearing ordinary Levi’s but she had done something amusing to the cuffs, blousing them out with a bright paisley material for the final four inches so that they looked like pants out of some sailor’s whimsy.
‘Yeah,’ Eddie said. ‘Most of the time, Derry’s pretty boring.’
‘Well, I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s because he wasn’t born here,’ Mike said diffidently. ‘It’s like — I don’t know — like it’s all new to him, or like, you know, if you came in during the middle of a movie — ‘
‘Sh-sh-sure, you’d want to see the s-start,’ Bill said.
‘Yeah,’ Mike said. ‘There’s a lot of history lying around in Derry. I kind of like it. And I think some of it has to do with this thing — this It, if you want to call it that.’
He looked at Bill and Bill nodded, his eyes thoughtful.
‘So I was looking through it after the Fourth of July parade because I knew I’d seen that clown before. I knew it. And look.’
He opened the book, thumbed through it, then handed it to Ben, who was sitting on his right.
‘D-D-Don’t t-t-touch the puh-puh-pages!’ Bill said, and there was such ur gency in his voice that they all jumped. He had fisted the hand he had cut reaching into Georgie’s album, Richie saw. Fisted it into a tight, protective knot.
‘Bill’s right,’ Richie said, and that subdued, totally un-Richielike voice was a powerful convincer. ‘Be careful. It’s like Stan said. If we saw it happen, you guys could see it happen, too.’
‘Feel it,’ Bill added grimly.
The album went from hand to hand, each of them holding the book gingerly, by the edges, as if it were old dynamite sweating big beads of nitro.
It came back to Mike. He