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Bill grabs the Stunbolt from Mike and heads off into the QUAKING DARKNESS — It 2017 script.
“You’re not Georgie,” Bill says. And he shoots the clown in the head.
If only it were that easy.
The thing about writing is, you’re always looking for something. Bill takes a lot of walks. He says it’s part of his process, but that’s bullshit. Really it’s wandering around Los Angeles, staring at the palm trees, and wondering where all the water goes when it rains. It’s sitting on a bench, the one by that dinky little park near his house with a Saguaro cactus and a rusty swing set and a corroded water fountain, and pulling out his little leather-bound notebook, and getting stuck two words in. Water, he’ll write. Or glue. Or asshole. And then he sits and stares, the pen shaking in his hand, and then he sighs and walks home.
Nobody likes his endings. He says it doesn’t get to him. Really, they should be thanking him for even ending the damn books at all. For even starting them. It’s insane, starting a book. It’s absolutely stark raving mad. To say nothing of finishing one, to say nothing of filling in the fucking middle. Writing a book, that’s cutting off a piece of yourself. Not like your appendix but a vital piece, your nose or your left hand. Cutting it off, and staring at it under a microscope for a year and a half, and letting someone else press it between glass slides for another year, and then slapping a paper jacket on it and shipping it off to every corner store from Seattle to fucking Florida.
Bill has done it enough—cut off a hand, a foot, the tip of an ear—that he thinks, next time, I’ll get it. Next time, I’ll cut the thing off and I’ll do the autopsy and I’ll find something buried beneath the surface. I’ll go for my walk and sit on my park bench and an angel will materialize out of the Saguaro and give me the therapy session of a lifetime.
And still, every time, he stares at the sun until his eyes hurt, and then he calls his editor and asks her where the water goes when it rains.
Imagine having a little brother.
Who worships you, of course he worships you, you’re clever and you know everything, or you can teach him how to ride a bike and how to whistle with a blade of grass and which step on the stair creaks going up, which amounts to basically everything.
He worships you, and you teach him everything, and you let him go one day because your throat hurts and really you don’t want to go outside in that storm. You let him go, and he gets eaten by a demonic clown.
And then you forget about him for twenty-two years.
As he crosses the town line into Derry, Bill’s hands start to shake. At first it’s only at a red light: he has to shift gears, but his fingers don’t stay steady long enough to get a grip on the gearshift, and the truck behind him is trying to honk his eardrums out by the time he gets going. But then it’s at a turn, an then it’s on the road past the high school—his old high school, what the fuck—and then finally he’s sliding to a stop in an empty lot by the grocery store, barely getting the wheel straight in time to avoid hitting a curb. The rental company can deal with it. He walks the rest of the way to the restaurant.
And through all of it—the food, the drinks, the friends spinning back—he feels it. Like a mountain dropped onto his back. Like he’s been standing in the ocean for twenty years, but couldn’t feel the tides rolling in and out. Like he’s thirteen again: hold a weight like that on your shoulders, hold a body, and you won’t notice how heavy it was until it’s gone.
You had a little brother, he tells himself that night. Writes it, in the little leather-bound notebook. You had a little brother. His name was Georgie. You let him die.
The worst thing about it is. Well, the worst thing, objectively, is the child-eating clown, but like, personally, emotionally, the worst thing is that, even if he’d done everything right, gone down onto the street with Georgie and chased him through the puddles and held the little newspaper boat aloft like it just circumnavigated the globe, It would have taken someone else. Bill hears the screams when he closes his eyes, flat on his back on the too-thick mattress in that stuffy room at the inn. Georgie at first, and then modulating, and then a chorus. You left us. You abandoned us. You slapped band aids over that hole in your chest and called it fiction. How could you. How could you.
He reaches into the storm drain.
Time slows—he is reaching, every muscle in his arm contracted in one long stretch of filaments and glycogen—and he is two feet back on the street screaming you idiot, this is every horror cliché, get back, fucking get back—and he is thirteen years old, his arms too short his consonants too weak his guilt—
“Georgie,” he says. “Take my hand. Please. Georgie.”
As though, if he reached hard enough, the drain would stretch back twenty-seven years.
Take my hand. Pull me in. Pull me instead.
If there were a body, it would have been easier. Even a mangled body, missing an arm or a heart, cold or still bleeding, would be something. Something to touch, something to say goodbye to. Something to hold up in his mind next to the image of Georgie, grinning as he sailed down the hill on Bill’s old bike, his feet barely touching the pedals, and say—there. Okay. Fine.
The writer in him calls this a problem of signification: the word lost or gone is only air with no substance behind it, while the word dead has weight. The thirteen-year-old just calls it unfair.
His hands don’t shake on the bike. Of course they don’t, it’s hard to shake when you’re welded: melted down to hot metal and thrust into a new shape, pounded with the blacksmith’s hammer until you’re sharpened to a point. For the first time since he crossed into Derry his mind is empty, no phantom limbs or metaphors. There is only his palms sticky against the handlebars, his legs pumping, his lungs.
Get to the fair. Save the boy. Not again.
Notagainnotagainnotagainnotagainnotagain.
What do you do with a guilt this big?
Can’t press it down into two dimensions, no. Can’t sketch it out in ink. Can’t force it down onto its back in a therapist’s office. Can’t bake it into a roast, can’t scratch it out with drugs, can’t throw it out a window and hope it never lands. You can forget it, maybe, but it will linger, like a clamp around your ribcage, shuddering every time you take a breath. Or you can melt it down and pound it into a sword, but that’s temporary, and anyway there’s always a recoil. Blood is the same color whether or not it’s yours.
Bill stares at himself in the funhouse mirror. Doesn’t recognize this man: the blown pupils, the wild hair, the throat rubbed raw from screaming. He should be thirteen and raising a fist, or he should be eighty and snarling, or he should be there in the mirror. A black hole, all-encompassing.
His friends are assholes. Don’t they get that this is a suicide mission? It’s fucking textbook, a trope in his freshman-year writing workshop, the moment when the hero marches off to fight the bad guy with nothing but his anger and a few bullets. But his friends all stand at his back—like this is one of their old games. Follow the leader. Red light green light. Put your hand on my back, and you’ll move when I move.
They all look at him. Richie vibrating, Bev with her hands clenched into fists, Mike with his shoulders tight, Ben’s mouth half-open like he’s about to recite Shakespeare, Eddie reaching for a phantom fanny pack. All at attention. He used to go first, when they raced down the hill to the quarry, legs pumping and palms melded to the handlebars. If there were any loose stones, any trash flung into the path, he could hit it and flip before anyone else could.
Once more unto the breach, he thinks.
It’s the wrong allusion—too noble, too self-inventing—but that doesn’t matter. What matters is this, now: his hands against the door, pushing in.
Put the boat in the pile. Let it burn. Let go. Come on, let go, you can do this. It’s been twenty-seven years, it’s not like George’s fingerprints are still on it—or are they, how long does DNA linger? Do normal rules of cell regeneration apply when you’re dealing with a psychotic demon clown?
He can feel their gaze on him—all of them, his friends with their own fears and their trembling—as he hesitates. The weight settles into the curve of his shoulders: heavy, familiar. They’re waiting, as though for a command to push past his quaking throat.
Let go. You can do this.
He clenches his arm, muscle freezing for a second between cycles of respiration, and drops. Mike lights the pile on fire, and as the flames dance he wishes he could trade places with the paper and wax.
There’s this story about two sisters. Procne, older, and Philomela, younger. Procne’s husband rapes Philomela, and when Philomela screams that she will tell the world, the husband cuts out her tongue. Ovid compares the tongue to a severed snake’s tail, quivering, begging for repair.
Philomela weaves her story into a tapestry and sends it to her sister, who rescues her. They seek revenge. Finally all three players—the older, the younger, and the monster—are turned to birds. They have taken wings, Ovid says. They chase each other forever, crying, painted in blood.
In the basement, water rising around his feet, Bill wishes for wings. No: he wishes for the opposite of personification. Turn him into anything, a snake, a tongue, the helium in a hot air balloon, lines on a page. Anything that can be cast off.
But it is not that easy. There was a boy sitting on his shoulders once, feet knocking against his back and fingers pulling at his hair. And now there are six assholes. There is a town full of kids on skateboards and bikes and rollerblades, sailing through to the end of the world.
“You’re not Georgie,” Bill says. And he stands.
The thing about crushing a demonic clown’s heart in your hands is, it takes seven people. Five bodies and two ghosts will do. But they all need to be there, in that circle. They all need to feel it, the heart, the slime of it, the deep cold. They all need to contract their muscles and scream.
The quarry is freezing cold. Was it always this cold? Was the impact like this, when they were younger—stinging along every inch of skin then numbing, like jumping into a freezer. Stinging, then numbing, then sharp. He feels suddenly naked, even though he’s still wearing boxers and a T-shirt, stripped down and parsed to his bones like a forest in winter, or like prose in a Hemingway novel.
God. He always hated Hemingway. So sparse, and so smug about it, too. He feels like screaming.
He feels like screaming, but instead he flips to his back and turns his face towards the sun. Strange, how the sun can still be shining, after everything. Strange how it can still be summer: deep green in the trees, turtles napping on the bank, water shining. A whole reflected world to sink into.
But Bill’s not sinking, not now. He is lying on his back. He is splashing Ben, pulling a face at Mike, tugging on Bev’s wet curls. He is curling up against Richie, arm around his shoulder, staying there quiet until their breathing matches. If it wasn’t Eddie, it would’ve been someone else. That doesn’t make it any easier. But there is this, still: sunlight shining on the water. Lungs against lungs, skin against skin.
After he gets back to the inn—well, after the raiding the bar, and the stitching everyone up, and the sitting with Richie as he pretends not to cry—he calls Audra. Tells her he loves her. Then, he takes out the little leather-bound notebook and writes down everything he remembers about Georgie. Lists, scenes, names of cartoons. His favorite type of cereal. The way his face got all scrunched up when Bill told him he couldn’t hang out with Bill’s friends. The color of the raincoat he wore that day. Yellow like something out of a picture book, or like maybe the picture book was drawn based on Georgie, and the artist just forgot.
I had a little brother. His name was Georgie. I let him die. Before that, I taught him how to ride a bike, and how to whistle with a blade of grass, and how to sneak up the stairs real quiet so that our parents wouldn’t wake up. He taught me how to write stories, ones with conflict in the middle and joy at the end. I didn’t know how to say it then, but I loved him. I would have sailed through the sewers for him, from Derry all the way to the end of the world.
Bill doesn’t sleep that night. Too much to write down.
Before anyone leaves, he gets all the Losers in a circle and tells them to make a promise.
“I’m not cutting my hand again,” Richie says, eyes red. “Eds wouldn’t shut up about blood-borne illnesses for. Fuck.”
Bill shakes his head, puts one hand on Richie’s shoulder. “I want us to write to each other,” he says. “Once a month at least. I’ve got this—” He fumbles in his pocket. “This notebook. We can all put our addresses here.
They all look at him, and he nearly bursts into glass shards right there, and then Bev laughs and says, “You know it’s the twenty-first century, right? We have, like, phones.”
When Bill was eleven and Georgie was five, Georgie would come into his room at night. It wasn’t that George was scared of any particular monster—his closet was clear, and so was the space under his bed. But Georgie had just discovered his Imagination, specifically that Imagination could be vocalized and projected onward onto others, specifically onto an older brother who always knew the right spots to go, Wow, and, Damn, and the right questions to ask, like, Where did the Bear Captain learn to swordfight? and, How does the kingdom of Refrigeratoria choose its leaders? Georgie would open Bill’s door, just a crack, enough that the light from the night light in the bathroom trickled in and outlined the bed, the desk, the sweaters hanging off the side of the dresser. He’d ask, Are you awake, and Bill would say yes even if he hadn’t been, and Georgie would crawl in and put his cold feet up against Bill’s shins like a diver pushing off for a triple flip. And he’d tell stories until one of them fell asleep, his voice quick at first then slowing, slowing, melting into a long yawn.
Bill writes a short story about this. And about Procne and Philomela, and about bodies and birds and blood, but mostly about this. He does not publish the short story. He sends it to Mike, and Richie, and Bev, and Ben. They all tell him it’s terrible: no suspense, flat characters, bad ending.
He prints out their emails and tapes them to his fridge.