On Saturdays, when Eddie could find no one to play with, he often went down to the trainyards. No real reason; he just liked to go out there.
He would ride his bike out Witcham Street and then cut to the northwest along Route 2 where it crossed Witcham. The Neibolt Street Church School stood on the corner of Route 2 and Neibolt Street a mile or so farther on. It was a shabby-neat wood-frame building with a large cross on top and the words SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME written over the front door in gilt letters two feet high. Sometimes, on Saturdays, Eddie heard music and singing coming from inside. It was gospel music, but whoever was playing the piano sounded more like Jerry Lee Lewis than a regular church piano player. The singing didn’t sound very religious to Eddie, either, although there was lots of stuff in it about “beautiful Zion” and being “washed in the blood of the lamb” and “what a friend we have in Jesus.” The people singing seemed to be having much too good a time for it to really be sacred singing, in Eddie’s opinion. But he liked the sound of it all the same—the way he liked to hear Jerry Lee hollering out “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Sometimes he would stop for awhile across the street, leaning his bike against a tree and pretending to read on the grass, actually jiving along to the music.
Other Saturdays the Church School would be shut up and silent and he would ride out to the trainyard without stopping, out to where Neibolt Street ended in a parking lot with weeds growing up through the cracks in the asphalt. There he would lean his bike against the wooden fence and watch the trains go by. There were a lot of them on Saturdays. His mother told him that in the old days you could catch a GS&WM passenger train at what was then Neibolt Street Station, but the passenger trains had stopped running around the time the Korean War was starting up. “If you got on the northbound train you went to Brownsville Station,” she said, “and from Brownsville you could catch a train that would take you all the way across Canada if you wanted, all the way to the Pacific. The southbound train would take you to Portland and then on down to Boston, and from South Station the country was yours. But the passenger trains have gone the way of the trolley lines now, I guess. No one wants to ride a train when they can just jump in a Ford and go. You may never even ride one.”
But great long freights still came through Derry. They headed south loaded down with pulpwood, paper, and potatoes, and north with manufactured goods for those towns of what Maine people sometimes called the Big Northern—Bangor, Millinocket, Machias, Presque Isle, Houlton. Eddie particularly liked to watch the northbound car-carriers with their loads of gleaming Fords and Chevies. I’ll have me a car like one of those someday, he promised himself. Like one of those or even better. Maybe even a Cadillac!
There were six tracks in all, swooping into the station like strands of cobweb tending toward the center: Bangor and Great Northern Lines from the north, the Great Southern and Western Maine from the west, the Boston and Maine from the south, and Southern Seacoast from the east.
One day two years before, when Eddie had been standing near the latter line and watching a train go through, a drunken trainman had thrown a crate out of a slow-moving boxcar at him. Eddie ducked and flinched backward, although the crate landed in the cinders ten feet away. There were things inside it, live things that clicked and moved. “Last run, boy!” the drunken trainman had shouted. He pulled a flat brown bottle from one of the pockets of his denim jacket, tipped it up, drank, then flipped it into the cinders, where it smashed. The trainman pointed at the crate. “Take em home to yer mum! Compliments of the Southern-Fucking-Seacoast-Bound-for-Welfare Line!” He had reeled forward to shout these last words as the train pulled away, gathering speed now, and for one alarming moment Eddie thought he was going to tumble right out.
When the train was gone, Eddie went to the box and bent cautiously over it. He was afraid to get too close. The things inside were slithery and crawly. If the trainman had yelled that they were for him, Eddie would have left them right there. But he had said take em home to your Mom, and, like Ben, when someone said Mom, Eddie jumped.
He scrounged a hank of rope from one of the empty quonset warehouses and tied the crate onto the package carrier of his bike. His mother had peered inside the crate even more warily than Eddie himself, and then she screamed—but with delight rather than terror. There were four lobsters in the crate, big two-pounders with their claws pegged. She cooked them for supper and had been extremely grumpy with Eddie when he wouldn’t eat any.
“What do you think the Rockefellers are eating this evening at their place in Bar Harbor?” she asked indignantly. “What do you think the swells are eating at Twenty-one and Sardi’s in New York City? Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? They’re eating lobster, Eddie, same as we are! Now come on—give it a try.”
But Eddie wouldn’t—at least that was what his mother said. Maybe it was true, but inside it felt more to Eddie like couldn’t than wouldn’t. He kept thinking of the way they had slithered inside the crate, and the clicking sounds their claws had made. She kept telling him how delicious they were and what a treat he was missing until he started to gasp for breath and had to use his aspirator. Then she left him alone.
Eddie retreated to his bedroom and read. His mother called up her friend Eleanor Dunton. Eleanor came over and the two of them read old copies of Photoplay and Screen Secrets and giggled over the gossip columns and gorged themselves on cold lobster salad. When Eddie got up for school the next morning, his mother was still in bed, snoring away and letting frequent farts that sounded like long, mellow cornet notes (she was Getting Off Some Good Ones, Richie would have said). There was nothing left in the bowl where the lobster salad had been except a few tiny blots of mayonnaise.
That was the last Southern Seacoast train Eddie ever saw, and when he later saw Mr. Braddock, the Derry trainmaster, he asked him hesitantly what had happened. “Cump’ny went broke,” Mr. Braddock said. “That’s all there was to it. Don’t you read the papers? It’s hap’nin all over the damn country. Now get out of here. This ain’t no place for a kid.”
After that Eddie would sometimes walk along track 4, which had been the Southern Seacoast track, and listen as a mental conductor chanted names inside his head, reeling them off in a lovely Downeast monotone, those names, those magic names: Camden, Rockland, Bar Harbor (pronounced Baa Haabaa), Wiscasset, Bath, Portland, Ogunquit, the Berwicks; he would walk down track 4 heading east until he got tired, and the weeds growing up between the crossties made him feel sad. Once he had looked up and seen seagulls (probably just fat old dump-gulls who didn’t give a shit if they ever saw the ocean, but that had not occurred to him then) wheeling and crying overhead, and the sound of their voices had made him cry a little, too.
There had once been a gate at the entrance to the trainyards, but it had blown over in a windstorm and no one had bothered to replace it. Eddie came and went pretty much as he liked, although Mr. Braddock would kick him out if he saw him (or any other kid, for that matter). There were truck-drivers who would chase you sometimes (but not very far) because they thought you were hanging around just so you could hawk something—and sometimes kids did.
Mostly, though, the place was quiet. There was a guard-booth but it was empty, its glass windows broken by stones. There had been no full-time security service since 1950 or so. Mr. Braddock shooed the kids away by day and a night-watchman drove through four or five times a night in an old Studebaker with a searchlight mounted outside the vent window and that was all.
There were tramps and hobos sometimes, though. If anything about the trainyards scared Eddie, they did—men with unshaven cheeks and cracked skin and blisters on their hands and coldsores on their lips. They rode the rails for awhile and then climbed down for awhile and spent some time in Derry and then got on another train and went somewhere else. Sometimes they had missing fingers. Usually they were drunk and wanted to know if you had a cigarette.
One of these fellows had crawled out from under the porch of the house at 29 Neibolt Street one day and had offered to give Eddie a blowjob for a quarter. Eddie had backed away, his skin like ice, his mouth as dry as lintballs. One of the hobo’s nostrils had been eaten away. You could look right into the red, scabby channel.
“I don’t have a quarter,” Eddie said, backing toward his bike.
“I’ll do it for a dime,” the hobo croaked, coming toward him. He was wearing old green flannel pants. Yellow puke was stiffening across the lap. He unzipped his fly and reached inside. He was trying to grin. His nose was a red horror.
“I . . . I don’t have a dime, either,” Eddie said, and suddenly thought: Oh my God he’s got leprosy! If he touches me I’ll catch it too! His control snapped and he ran. He heard the hobo break into a shuffling run behind him, his old string-tied shoes slapping and flapping across the riotous lawn of the empty saltbox house.
“Come back here, kid! I’ll blow you for free. Come back here!”
Eddie had leaped on his bike, wheezing now, feeling his throat closing up to a pinhole. His chest had taken on weight. He hit the pedals and was just picking up speed when one of the hobo’s hands struck the package carrier. The bike shimmied. Eddie looked over his shoulder and saw the hobo running along behind the rear wheel (!!GAINING!!), his lips drawn back from the black stumps of his teeth in an expression which might have been either desperation or fury.
In spite of the stones lying on his chest Eddie had pedaled even faster, expecting that one of the hobo’s scab-crusted hands would close over his arm at any moment, pulling him from his Raleigh and dumping him in the ditch, where God knew what would happen to him. He hadn’t dared look around until he had flashed past the Church School and through the Route 2 intersection. The ’bo was gone.
Eddie held this terrible story inside him for almost a week and then confided it to Richie Tozier and Bill Denbrough one day when they were reading comics over the garage.
“He didn’t have leprosy, you dummy,” Richie said. “He had the Syph.”
Eddie looked at Bill to see if Richie was ribbing him—he had never heard of a disease called the Sift before. It sounded like something Richie might have made up.
“Is there such a thing as the Sift, Bill?”
Bill nodded gravely. “Only it’s the Suh-Suh-Syph, not the Sift. It’s s-short for syphilis.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a disease you get from fucking,” Richie said. “You know about fucking, don’t you, Eds?”
“Sure,” Eddie said. He hoped he wasn’t blushing. He knew that when you got older, stuff came out of your penis when it was hard. Vincent “Boogers” Taliendo had filled him in on the rest one day at school. What you did when you fucked, according to Boogers, was you rubbed your cock against a girl’s stomach until it got hard (your cock, not the girl’s stomach). Then you rubbed some more until you started to “get the feeling.” When Eddie asked what that meant, Boogers had only shaken his head in a mysterious way. Boogers said that you couldn’t describe it, but you’d know it as soon as you got it. He said you could practice by lying in the bathtub and rubbing your cock with Ivory soap (Eddie had tried this, but the only feeling he got was the need to urinate after awhile). Anyway, Boogers went on, after you “got the feeling,” this stuff came out of your penis. Most kids called it come, Boogers said, but his big brother had told him that the really scientific word for it was jizzum. And when you “got the feeling,” you had to grab your cock and aim it real fast so you could shoot the jizzum into the girl’s bellybutton as soon as it came out. It went down into her stomach and made a baby there.
Do girls like that? Eddie had asked Boogers Taliendo. He himself was sort of appalled.
I guess they must, Boogers had replied, looking mystified himself.
“Now listen up, Eds,” Richie said, “because there may be questions later. Some women have got this disease. Some men, too, but mostly it’s women. A guy can get it from a woman—”
“Or another g-g-guy if they’re kwuh-kwuh-queer,” Bill added.
“Right. The important thing is you get the Syph from screwing someone who’s already got it.”
“What does it do?” Eddie asked.
“Makes you rot,” Richie said simply.
Eddie stared at him, horrified.
“It’s bad, I know, but it’s true,” Richie said. “Your nose is the first thing to go. Some guys with the Syph, their noses fall right off. Then their cocks.”
“Puh-Puh-Puh-leeze,” Bill said. “I just a-a-ate.”
“Hey, man, this is science,” Richie said.
“So what’s the difference between leprosy and the Syph?” Eddie asked.
“You don’t get leprosy from fucking,” Richie said promptly, and then went off into a gale of laughter that left both Bill and Eddie mystified.
Following that day the house at 29 Neibolt Street had taken on a kind of glow in Eddie’s imagination. Looking at its weedy yard and its slumped porch and the boards nailed across its windows, he would feel an unhealthy fascination take hold of him. And six weeks ago he had parked his bike on the gravelly verge of the street (the sidewalk ended four houses farther back) and walked across the lawn toward the porch of that house.
His heart had been beating hard in his chest, and his mouth had that dry taste again—listening to Bill’s story of the dreadful picture, he knew that what he had felt when approaching that house was about the same as what Bill had felt going into George’s room. He did not feel as if he was in control of himself. He felt pushed.
It did not seem as if his feet were moving; instead the house itself, brooding and silent, seemed to draw closer to where he stood.
Faintly, he could hear a diesel engine in the trainyard—that and the liquid-metallic slam of couplings being made. They were shunting some cars onto sidings, picking up others. Making a train.
His hand gripped his aspirator, but, oddly, his asthma had not closed down as it had on the day he fled from the hobo with the rotted nose. There was only that sense of standing still and watching the house slide stealthily toward him, as if on a hidden track.
Eddie looked under the porch. There was no one there. It was not really surprising. This was spring, and hobos showed up most frequently in Derry from late September to early November. During those six weeks or so a man could pick up day-work on one of the outlying farms if he looked even half-decent. There were potatoes and apples to pick, snow-fence to string, barn and shed roofs which needed to be patched before December came along, whistling up winter.
No hobos under the porch, but plenty of sign they had been there. Empty beer cans, empty beer bottles, empty liquor bottles. A dirt-crusted blanket lay against the brick foundation like a dead dog. There were drifts of crumpled newspapers and one old shoe and a smell like garbage. There were thick layers of old leaves under there.
Not wanting to do it but unable to help himself, Eddie had crawled under the porch. He could feel his heartbeat slamming in his head now, driving white spots of light across his field of vision.
The smell was worse underneath—booze and sweat and the dark brown perfume of decaying leaves. The old leaves didn’t even crackle under his hands and knees. They and the old newspapers only sighed.
I’m a hobo, Eddie thought incoherently. I’m a hobo and I ride the rods. That’s what I do. Ain’t got no money, ain’t got no home, but I got me a bottle and a dollar and a place to sleep. I’ll pick apples this week and potatoes the week after that and when the frost locks up the ground like money inside a bank vault, why, I’ll hop a GS&WM box that smells of sugar-beets and I’ll sit in the corner and pull some hay over me if there is some and I’ll drink me a little drink and chew me a little chew and sooner or later I’ll get to Portland or Beantown, and if I don’t get busted by a railroad security dick I’ll hop one of those ’Bama Star boxes and head down south and when I get there I’ll pick lemons or limes or oranges. And if I get vagged I’ll build roads for tourists to ride on. Hell, I done it before, ain’t I? I’m just a lonesome old hobo, ain’t got no money, ain’t got no home, but I got me one thing; I got me a disease that’s eating me up. My skin’s cracking open, my teeth are falling out, and you know what? I can feel myself turning bad like an apple that’s going soft, I can feel it happening, eating from the inside to the out, eating, eating, eating me.
Eddie pulled the stiffening blanket aside, tweezing at it with his thumb and forefinger, grimacing at its matted feel. One of those low cellar windows was directly behind it, one pane broken, the other opaque with dirt. He leaned forward, now feeling almost hypnotized. He leaned closer to the window, closer to the cellar-darkness, breathing in that smell of age and must and dry-rot, closer and closer to the black, and surely the leper would have caught him if his asthma hadn’t picked that exact moment to kick up. It cramped his lungs with a weight that was painless yet frightening; his breath at once took on the familiar hateful whistling sound.
He drew back, and that was when the face appeared. Its coming was so sudden, so startling (and yet at the same time so expected), that Eddie could not have screamed even if he hadn’t been having an asthma attack. His eyes bulged. His mouth creaked open. It was not the hobo with the flayed nose, but there were resemblances. Terrible resemblances. And yet . . . this thing could not be human. Nothing could be so eaten up and remain alive.
The skin of its forehead was split open. White bone, coated with a membrane of yellow mucusy stuff, peered through like the lens of a bleary searchlight. The nose was a bridge of raw gristle above two red flaring channels. One eye was a gleeful blue. The other socket was filled with a mass of spongy brown-black tissue. The leper’s lower lip sagged like liver. It had no upper lip at all; its teeth poked out in a sneering ring.
It shot one hand out through the broken pane. It shot the other through the dirty glass to the left, shattering it to fragments. Its questing, clutching hands crawled with sores. Beetles crawled and lumbered busily to and fro.
Mewling, gasping, Eddie hunched his way backward. He could hardly breathe. His heart was a runaway engine in his chest. The leper appeared to be wearing the ragged remains of some strange silvery suit. Things were crawling in the straggles of its brown hair.
“How bout a blowjob, Eddie?” the apparition croaked, grinning with its remains of a mouth. It lilted, “Bobby does it for a dime, he will do it anytime, fifteen cents for overtime.” It winked. “That’s me, Eddie—Bob Gray. And now that we’ve been properly introduced . . .” One of its hands splatted against Eddie’s right shoulder. Eddie screamed thinly.
“That’s all right,” the leper said, and Eddie saw with dreamlike terror that it was crawling out of the window. The bony shield behind its peeling forehead snapped the thin wooden strip between the two panes. Its hands clawed through the leafy, mulchy earth. The silver shoulders of its suit . . . costume . . . whatever it was . . . began to push through the gap. That one glaring blue eye never left Eddie’s face.
“Here I come, Eddie, that’s all right,” it croaked. “You’ll like it down here with us. Some of your friends are down here.”
Its hand reached out again, and in some corner of his panic-maddened, screaming mind, Eddie was suddenly, coldly sure that if that thing touched his bare skin, he would begin to rot, too. The thought broke his paralysis. He skittered backward on his hands and knees, then turned and lunged for the far end of the porch. Sunlight, falling in narrow dusty beams through the cracks between the porch boards, striped his face from moment to moment. His head pushed through the dusty cobwebs that settled in his hair. He looked back over his shoulder and saw that the leper was halfway out.
“It won’t do you any good to run, Eddie,” it called.
Eddie had reached the far end of the porch. There was a latticework skirt here. The sun shone through it, printing diamonds of light on his cheeks and forehead. He lowered his head and slammed into it with no hesitation at all, tearing the entire skirt free with a scream of rusted ha’penny nails. There was a tangle of rosebushes beyond and Eddie tore through these, stumbling to his feet as he did so, not feeling the thorns that scrawled shallow cuts along his arms and cheeks and neck.
He turned and backed away on buckling legs, pulling his aspirator out of his pocket, triggering it. Surely it hadn’t really happened? He had been thinking about that hobo and his mind had . . . well, had just
(put on a show)
shown him a movie, a horror movie, like one of those Saturday- matinee pictures with Frankenstein and Wolfman that they had sometimes at the Bijou or the Gem or the Aladdin. Sure, that was all. He had scared himself! What an asshole!
There was even time to utter a shaky laugh at the unsuspected vividness of his imagination 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 clown suit with big 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?
Fo 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, its 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’t do you any good to run, Eddie.
“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 responsibility 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 looked 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 mistrustfully. Bright spots of color flamed 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 interrupted, making them all jump as if they had been shot: “Jay-sus Christ on a jumped-up chariot-driven crutch! Look at this mess! Jesus Christ!”