It: A Novel by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King [King, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9781501142970
Amazon: 0451169514
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2016-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

4

Richie Tozier Makes Tracks

Well, there was the day Henry and his friends chased me—before the end of school, this was. . . .

Richie was walking along Outer Canal Street, past Bassey Park. Now he stopped, hands stuffed in his pockets, looking toward the Kissing Bridge but not really seeing it.

I got away from them in the toy department of Freese’s. . . .

Since the mad conclusion of the reunion lunch, he had been walking aimlessly, trying to make his peace with the awful things which had been in the fortune cookies . . . or the things which had seemed to be in the cookies. He thought that most likely nothing at all had come out of them. It had been a group hallucination brought on by all the spooky shit they had been talking about. The best proof of the hypothesis was that Rose had seen nothing at all. Of course, Beverly’s parents had never seen any of the blood that came out of the bathroom drain either, but this wasn’t the same.

No? Why not?

“Because we’re grownups now,” he muttered, and discovered the thought had absolutely no power or logic at all; it might as well have been a nonsense line from a kid’s skip-rope chant.

He started to walk again.

I went up by City Center and sat down on a park bench for awhile and I thought I saw . . .

He stopped again, frowning.

Saw what?

. . . but that was just something I dreamed.

Was it? Was it really?

He looked to the left and saw the big glass-brick-and-steel building that had looked so modern in the late fifties and now looked rather antique and tacky.

And here I am, he thought. Right back to fucking City Center. Scene of that other hallucination. Or dream. Or whatever it was.

The others saw him as the Klass Klown, the Krazy Kut-up, and he had fallen neatly and easily into that role again. Ah, we all fell neatly and easily back into our old roles again, didn’t you notice? But was there anything very unusual about that? He thought you would probably see much the same thing at any tenth or twentieth high-school reunion—the class comedian who had discovered a vocation for the priesthood in college would, after two drinks, revert almost automatically to the wiseacre he had been; the Great English Brain who had wound up with a GM truck dealership would suddenly begin spouting off about John Irving or John Cheever; the guy who had played with the Moondogs on Saturday nights and who had gone on to become a mathematics professor at Cornell would suddenly find himself on stage with the band, a Fender guitar strapped over his shoulder, whopping out “Gloria” or “Surfin’ Bird” with gleeful drunken ferocity. What was it Springsteen said? No retreat, baby, no surrender . . . but it was easier to believe in the oldies on the record-player after a couple of drinks or some pretty good Panama Red.

But, Richie believed, it was the reversion that was the hallucination, not the present life.

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