The Face of The Enemy

 

‘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, and 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 urgency 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 opened it to one of the first pages. ‘Daddy says there’s no way to date that one, but it’s probably from the early or mid-seventeen-hundreds,’ Mike said. ‘He repaired a guy’s bandsaw for a box of old books and pictures. That was one of them. He says it might be worth forty bucks or even more.’ 

The picture was a woodcut, the size of a large postcard. When Bill’s turn came to look at it, he was relieved to see that Mike’s father had the kind of album where the pictures were under a protective plastic sheet. He looked, fascinated, and he thought : There. I’m seeing him – or It. Really seeing. That’s the face of The Enemy. The picture showed a funny fellow juggling oversized bowling pins in the middle of a muddy street. There were a few houses on either side of the street, and a few huts that Bill guessed were stores, or trading posts, or whatever they called them back then. It didn’t look like Derry at all, except for the Canal. It was there, neatly cobbled on both sides. In the upper background, Bill could see a team of mules on a towpath, dragging a barge. 

There was a group of maybe half a dozen kids gathered around the funny fellow. One of them was wearing a pastoral straw hat. Another had a hoop and a stick to roll it with. Not the sort of stick that would come with a hoop that you bought today in a Woolworth’s; it was a branch from a tree. Bill could see the bare knobs on it where smaller branches had been lopped off with a knife or a hatchet. That baby wasn’t made in Taiwan or Korea, he thought, fascinated by this boy who could have been him if he’d been born four or five generations before. The funny fellow had a huge grin on his face. He wore no make-up (except to Bill his whole face looked like make-up), but he was bald except for two tufts of hair that stuck up like horns over his ears, and Bill had no trouble recognizing their clown. 

Two hundred years ago or more, he thought, and felt a crazy surge of terror, anger, and excitement rush through him. Twenty-seven years later, sitting in the Derry Public Library and remembering his first look into Mike’s father’s album, he realized he had felt the way a hunter might feel, coming upon the first fresh spoor of an old killer tiger. Two hundred years ago … that long, and only God knows how much longer. This led him to wonder just how long the spirit of Pennywise had been here in Derry – but he found that was a thought he did not really want to pursue. 

‘Gimme, Bill!’ Richie was saying, but Bill held the album a moment longer, staring fixedly at the woodcut, sure it would begin to move : the bowling pins (if that’s what they were) which the funny fellow was juggling would rise and fall, rise and fall, the kids would laugh and applaud (except maybe they wouldn’t all laugh and applaud; some of them might scream and run instead), the mule-team pulling the barge would move beyond the borders of the picture. It didn’t happen, and he passed the book on to Richie. 

When the album came back to Mike he turned some more pages, hunting. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘This one is from 1856, four years before Lincoln was elected President.’ The book went around again. This was a color picture – a sort of cartoon – which showed a bunch of drunks standing in front of a saloon while a fat politician with muttonchop whiskers declaimed from a board that had been set between two hogsheads. He held a foamy pitcher of beer in one hand. The board upon which he stood was considerably bowed with his weight. Some distance off, a group of bonneted women were looking at this show of mingled buffoonery and intemperance with disgust. The caption below the picture read: POLITICS IN DERRY IS THIRSTY WORK, SEZ SENATOR GARNER! 

‘Daddy says pictures like this were really popular for about twenty years before the Civil War,’ Mike said. ‘They called them “foolcards,” and people used to send them to each other. They were like some of the jokes in Mad, I guess.’ ‘Suh-suh-satire,’ Bill said. ‘Yeah,’ Mike said. ‘But now look down in the corner of this one.’ The picture was like Mad in another way – it had as many details and little side-jokes as a big Mort Drucker panel in a Mad magazine movie take-off. There was a grinning fat man pouring a glass of beer down a spotted dog’s throat. There was a woman who had fallen on her prat in a mudpuddle. There were two street urchins slyly sticking sulphur-headed matches into the soles of a prosperous-looking businessman’s shoes, and a girl swinging from her heels in an elm tree so that her underpants showed. But despite this bewildering intaglio of detail, none of them really needed Mike to point the clown out. Dressed in a loud checked vest-busting drummer’s suit, he was playing the shell-game with a bunch of drunken loggers. He was winking at a lumber jack who had, to judge by the gape-mouthed look of surprise on his face, just picked the wrong nutshell. The drummer/clown was taking a coin from him. ‘Him again,’ Ben said. ‘What … a hundred years later?’ ‘Just about,’ Mike said. ‘And here’s one from 1891.’ It was a clipping from the front page of the Derry News. HUZZAH! the headline proclaimed exuberantly. IRONWORKS OPENS! Just below this: ‘Town Turns Out for Gala Picnic.’ The picture showed a woodcut of the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Kitchener Ironworks; its style reminded Bill of the Currier and Ives prints his mother had in the dining room, although this was nowhere near as polished. A fellow tricked out in a morning coat and tophat was holding a large pair of open-jawed scissors above the Ironworks ribbon while a crowd of perhaps five hundred watched. Off to the left was a clown – their clown – turning a handspring for a group of children. The artist had caught him upside down, turning his smile into a scream. He passed the book on quickly to Richie. The next picture was a photograph under which Will Hanlon had written: 1933: Repeal in Derry. Although none of the boys knew much about either the Volstead Act or its repeal, the picture made the salient facts clear. The photo was of Wally’s Spa down in Hell’s Half-Acre. The place was almost literally filled to the rafters with men wearing open-collared white shirts, straw boaters, lumbermen’s shirts, tee-shirts, banker’s suits. All of them were holding glasses and bottles victoriously aloft. There were two big signs in the window. WELCOME BACK, JOHN BARLEYCORN! one read. The other said: FREE BEER TONIGHT. The clown, dressed like the biggest dandy you ever saw (white shoes, spats, gangster pants), had his foot on the running board of a Reo auto and was drinking champagne from a lady’s high-heeled shoe. 

‘1945,’ Mike said. The Derry News again. The headline: JAPAN SURRENDERS – IT’S OVER! THANK GOD IT’S OVER! A parade was snake-dancing its way along Main Street toward Up-Mile Hill. And there was the clown in the background, wearing his silver suit with the orange buttons, frozen in the matrix of dots that made up the grainy newsprint photo, seeming to suggest (at least to Bill) that nothing was over, no one had surrendered, nothing was won, nil was still the rule, zilch still the custom; seeming to suggest above all that all was still lost. Bill felt cold and dry and scared. Suddenly the dots in the picture disappeared and it began to move. ‘That’s what –’ Mike began. 

‘L-L-Look,’ Bill said. The word dropped out of his mouth like a partially melted ice-cube. ‘A-A-All of you luh-look at ththis!’ They crowded around. ‘Oh my God,’ Beverly whispered, awed. ‘That’s IT!’ Richie nearly screamed, pounding Bill on the back in his excitement. He looked around at Eddie’s white, drawn face and Stan Uris’s frozen one. ‘That’s what we saw in George’s room! That’s exactly what we –’ ‘Shhh,’ Ben said. ‘Listen.’ And, almost sobbing: ‘You can hear them – Christ, you can hear them in there.’ And in the silence that was only broken by the mild stir of the summer breeze, they all realized they could. The band was playing a martial marching tune, made faint and tinny by distance … or the passage of time … or whatever it was. The cheering of the crowd was like sounds that might come through on a badly tuned radio station. There were popping noises, also faint, like the muffled sound of snapping fingers. ‘Firecrackers,’ Beverly whispered, and rubbed at her eyes with hands that shook. ‘Those are firecrackers, aren’t they?’ No one answered. They watched the picture, their eyes eating up their faces. The parade wiggled its way toward them, but just before the marchers reached the extreme foreground – at the point where it seemed they must march right out of the picture and into a world thirteen years later – they dropped from sight, as if on some kind of unknowable curve. The World War I soldiers first, their faces strangely old under their pie-plate helmets, with their sign which read THE DERRY VFW WELCOMES HOME OUR BRAVE BOYS, then the Boy Scouts, the Kiwanians, the Home Nursing Corps, the Derry Christian Marching Band, then the Derry World War II vets themselves, with the high-school band behind them. The crowd moved and shifted. Tickertape and confetti fluttered down from the second- and third-floor windows of the business buildings that lined the streets. The clown pranced along the sidelines, doing splits and cartwheels, miming a sniper, miming a salute. And Bill noticed for the first time that people were turning from him – but not as if they saw him, exactly; it was more as if they felt a draft or smelled something bad. Only the children really saw him, and they shrank away. Ben stretched his hand out to the picture, as Bill had done in George’s room. ‘Nuh-Nuh-Nuh-NO!’ Bill cried. ‘I think it’s all right, Bill,’ Ben said. ‘Look.’ And he laid his hand on the protective plastic over the picture for a moment and then took it back. ‘But if you stripped off that cover –’ Beverly screamed. The clown had left off its antics when Ben withdrew his hand. It rushed toward them, its paint-bloody mouth gibbering and laughing. Bill winced back but held onto the book all the same, thinking it would drop out of sight as the parade had done, and the marching band, and the Boy Scouts, and the Cadillac convertible carrying Miss Derry of 1945. But the clown did not disappear along that curve that seemed to define the edge of that old existence. Instead, it leaped with a scary, nimble grace onto a lamppost that stood in the extreme left foreground of the picture. It shinnied up like a monkey on a stick – and suddenly its face was pressed against the tough plastic sheet Will Hanlon had put over each of the pages in his book. Beverly screamed again and this time Eddie joined her, although his scream was faint and blue-breathless. 

The plastic bulged out – later they would all agree they saw it. Bill saw the bulb of the clown’s red nose flatten, the way your nose will flatten when you press it against a windowpane. ‘Kill you all!’ The clown was laughing and screaming. ‘Try to stop me and I’ll kill you all! Drive you crazy and then kill you all! You can’t stop me! I’m the Gingerbread Man! I’m the Teenage Werewolf!’ And for a moment It was the Teenage Werewolf, the moon-silvered face of the lycanthrope peering out at them from over the collar of the silver suit, white teeth bared. ‘Can’t stop me, I’m the leper!’ Now the leper’s face, haunted and peeling, rotting with sores, stared at them with the eyes of the living dead. ‘Can’t stop me, I’m the mummy!’ The leper’s face aged and ran with sterile cracks. Ancient bandages swam halfway out of its skin and solidified there. Ben turned away, his face as white as curds, one hand plastered over his neck and ear. ‘Can’t stop me, I’m the dead boys!’ 

‘No!’ Stan Uris screamed. His eyes bulged above bruised-looking crescents of skin – shockflesh, Bill thought randomly, and it was a word he would use in a novel twelve years later, with no idea where it had come from, simply taking it, as writers take the right word at the right time, as a simple gift from that outer space (otherspace) where the good words come from sometimes. Stan snatched the album from his hands and slammed it shut. He held it closed with both hands, the tendons standing out along the inner surfaces of his wrists and forearms. He looked around at the others with eyes that were nearly insane. ‘No,’ he said rapidly. ‘No, no, no.’ 

And suddenly Bill found he was more concerned with Stan’s repeated denials than with the clown, and he understood that this was exactly the sort of reaction the clown had hoped to provoke, because … Because maybe It’s scared of us … really scared for the first time in Its long, long life. He grabbed Stan and shook him twice, hard, holding onto his shoulders. Stan’s teeth clicked together and he dropped the album. Mike picked it up and put it aside in a hurry, not liking to touch it after what he had seen. But it was still his father’s, and he understood intuitively that his father would never see in it what he had just seen. ‘No,’ Stan said softly. ‘Yes,’ Bill said. ‘No,’ Stan said again. ‘Yes. We a-a-all –’ ‘No.’ ‘– a-a-all suh-haw it, Stan,’ Bill said. He looked at the others. ‘Yes,’ Ben said. ‘Yes,’ Richie said. ‘Yes,’ Mike said. ‘Oh my God, yes.’ ‘Yes,’ Bev said. ‘Yes,’ Eddie managed, gasping it out of his rapidly closing throat. Bill looked at Stan, demanding with his eyes that Stan look back at him. ‘Duh-don’t let it g-g-get y-you, man,’ Bill said. ‘Yuh-you suh-saw it, t-t-too.’ 

‘I didn’t want to!’ Stan wailed. Sweat stood out on his brow in an oily sheen. ‘But y-y-you duh-duh-did.’ Stan looked at the others, one by one. He ran his hands through his short hair and fetched up a great, shuddering sigh. His eyes seemed to clear of that lowering madness that had so disturbed Bill. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. Okay. Yes. That what you want? Yes.’ Bill thought: We’re still all together. It didn’t stop us. We can still kill It. We can still kill It … if we’re brave. Bill looked around at the others and saw in each pair of eyes some measure of Stan’s hysteria. Not quite as bad, but there. ‘Y-Y-Yeah,’ he said, and smiled at Stan. After a moment Stan smiled back and some of that horrible shocked look left his face. ‘That’s what I wuh-wuh-wanted, you weh-weh-wet end.’ 

‘Beep-beep, Dumbo,’ Stan said, and they all laughed. It was hysterical screaming laughter, but better than no laughter at all, Bill reckoned. ‘C-C-Come on,’ he said, because someone had to say something. ‘Let’s f-f-finish the clubhouse. What do you s-s-say?’ He saw the gratitude in their eyes and felt a measure of gladness for them … but their gratitude did little to heal his own horror. In fact, there was something in their gratitude which made him want to hate them. Would he never be able to express his own terror, lest the fragile welds that made them into one thing should let go? And even to think such a thing wasn’t really fair, was it? Because in some measure at least he was using them – using his friends, risking their lives – to settle the score for his dead brother. And was even that the bottom? No, because George was dead, and if revenge could be exacted at all, Bill suspected it could only be exacted on behalf of the living. And what did that make him? A selfish little shit waving a tin sword and trying to make himself look like King Arthur? Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up. His resolve was still strong, but it was a bitter resolve. Bitter.