Chapter Text
The young man has been in the backseat of Eddie Kaspbrak’s taxi for approximately five minutes before he speaks. When he does, Eddie slams the breaks so hard the kid nearly goes flying.
“What did you just say?” Eddie asks, although he heard it rather clearly.
“I said,” the kid repeats, a slight rasp to his voice, “you need to come home.”
Eddie pulls the cab over, puts it in park, and turns around to look at his passenger.
He’s young—a kid, Eddie’s brain supplies again, although the boy isn’t that young, but he’s certainly much younger than Eddie, who turned 24 in November—and wiry, with unruly brown hair that falls just above his collarbone. He’s wearing a faded Juilliard sweater, with one sleeve pinned neatly below the stump of his left arm.
“Holy shit,” Eddie says.
It is at this moment that Eddie is overcome by a splitting headache, accompanied by three pieces of information.
The first is that he once had a very good friend named Bill, who had a younger brother named George. The second is that something horrible happened to George a very long time ago, although he can’t quite remember what the horrible thing was, beyond the fact that it was responsible for the loss of Georgie’s arm.
Little Georgie Denbrough, who isn’t so little anymore, smiles. “Hi, Eddie.”
The third piece of information is that home is not upstate New York where his mother currently resides but a town called Derry, a town he left ten years ago, a town to which he has never had even the slightest inclination to return.
“How much do you remember?” Georgie’s staring at him so intensely Eddie almost has to look away, but he doesn’t, just stares right back, fingers itching for the rounded piece of plastic in his pocket. He won’t use it, he won’t, the stupid
placebo
“I remember…” Eddie starts, struggling to describe the slightly shapeless nature of these memories, the way information seems to reach him at the same instance it departs. Vague details and the sense that he should not attempt to recall further. “I remember very little.”
“I thought so,” Georgie says. “You remember me, though?”
If someone had mentioned the name George Denbrough even ten minutes ago Eddie wouldn’t have had the slightest idea who they were talking about, but he remembers him now. Eddie is glad not to have any siblings (God knows what damage his mother might’ve inflicted on another child) but he loved Bill like a brother, and so when he looks at Georgie—this too tall, wild-eyed, nearly unrecognizable Georgie—he still sees family.
“Of course I do.”
“Good.” Georgie leans forward, squeezing between the front seats. “Now I’m going to say something, but you need to promise that you’ll be cool about it.”
“Okay?” Eddie says. “I’m cool. I’m totally cool.”
“I need you to come back to Derry so we can kill the clown.”
The clown. Shit, the clown, Eddie is very much not cool about the clown, and he’s very glad that the cab isn’t in motion because if it were he’d probably crash it. He can’t see clearly and there’s not enough air so he opens the door and staggers out onto the snow-dusted street, clutching at his chest not enough air not enough air, and he hasn’t used the goddamn inhaler
placebo
inhaler for three weeks now but still it lives in his pocket, every day, and the familiar licorice air is the best thing he’s ever tasted.
He can’t see Its face, is the thing, the clown the leper the clown but there’s just bright blankless where its face should be, he hears bone snapping running water the voices of his friends but he can’t see them, can’t see their faces why did he forget why can’t he remember why can’t he see Its face
“Eddie?” Georgie’s next to him, pulling him out of the road and onto the sidewalk. “Sorry,” he says. “I just had to tell you. And you didn’t even die.”
Eddie turns to him, wide-eyed. “Did you think I was going to die?”
“I didn’t,” Georgie says, “but Mike has…concerns about you guys remembering too quickly.”
Mike. Mike—what was his last name? He was another one of them, one of the
“Losers,” Eddie says. “That’s what we used to call ourselves.”
“Yes. And you promised you’d come back. You all did.”
Eddie shakes his head. The motion makes him dizzy. “No, we killed It, we were only gonna come back if It comes back, and it’s only been, what, eleven fucking years? It’s too early, it’s not time, I’m—”
I’m supposed to be middle-aged by the time I have to deal with this.
He did promise. He feels it, now, that sharp pain on each palm, smells copper and sweat, blood lingering in hazy summer air. It’s a cold January but Eddie is suddenly very warm.
He looks at his hands. A ropy white scar twists across each palm. The scars were not there yesterday.
“Eddie,” Georgie says again. “I’ll tell you everything, I promise, but not here, okay?”
“Okay,” Eddie says quietly, still looking at his hands. There are many different things he wants to say, but the one he settles on is “does Bill know that you’re here?”
Georgie just laughs, which doesn’t answer Eddie’s question at all.
After being reassured that Georgie’s alright, that he isn’t in some kind of trouble—which is not an unreasonable thing to ask, Eddie maintains, because it’s very early in the morning and what did the kid think he was doing standing out in the street like that, anyway—Eddie drops the cab off at the company depot. He’s saving to buy his own, he tells Georgie, because when you own your cab the taxi company takes a lower cut, and the downside of having to do maintenance yourself isn’t a downside at all for Eddie, who has been working part-time under a local mechanic since his sophomore year of college.
At this last part, Georgie grins so hard his face looks like it’s about to split open. “I didn’t know that,” he says, although Eddie doesn’t see why on earth he would have. “You always wanted to fix up old cars.”
“That’s right,” Eddie says, surprised and a little bit touched that Georgie remembers.
From the depot, they take the subway to Queens. Eddie very carefully does not touch anything, taking a handkerchief from his pocket and using it as a barrier between his hand and the subway pole. It has been approximately a year and a half since Eddie left his mother for the second time, but he still hears her voice in his head every time he takes the subway.
Eddie offers a second handkerchief to Georgie, who doesn’t take it, instead white-knuckling the edge of his plastic seat and staring wide-eyed as the train hurdles through the glowing tunnel.
“First time on the subway?” Eddie guesses.
“Not at all,” Georgie says quietly, looking somewhere beyond Eddie.
From there they walk the two blocks to Eddie’s apartment building. Georgie doesn’t talk much, just stops once to take a cigarette out of his pocket, holding it between his teeth while he lights it with a Zippo. It’s a well-practiced move, one that suggests he’s done this many times before.
“That shit’ll kill your lungs,” Eddie says.
Georgie just shrugs and takes a long drag on the cigarette. “A lot of things can kill you,” he says after a moment.
“Yes,” Eddie says, and suddenly feels very far away. “That’s right.”
When they reach his building, Eddie bypasses the elevator and leads Georgie to the stairwell. “It’s only three flights,” he says. What he doesn’t say is that he trusts the elevator about as far as he can throw it, which is to say not at all, and besides heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S, so even though Eddie’s cardiovascular health is in great shape (according to his physician) he’s not taking any chances.
Also, his mother hated taking the stairs.
Georgie gives him a strange sort of look. “Race ya,” he says, knocking their shoulders together.
Eddie stares after him as he bounds up the stairs.
Georgie’s already leaning against the apartment door when Eddie gets there, blowing a cloud of smoke into the hallway.
“How’d you know which one was mine?” Eddie asks.
“Same way I knew which street corner to stand on,” Georgie says easily.
Eddie just stares at him. He’s beginning to think the kid never learned how questions work.
Georgie moves away from the door. “You gonna let me in, or what?”
Eddie shakes his head and unlocks the door. “Would you put that out already?” he asks as they walk in, gesturing to the ashtray on the counter.
Georgie laughs and puts out the cigarette. “Why do you have an ashtray if you don’t smoke?”
“Because everyone else in this goddamn city does,” Eddie mutters, closing the door behind him and latching the chain.
When he turns around, Georgie is rooting around in one of the kitchen cabinets. “Eww, dude,” he says. “Why do you have ten boxes of Raisin Bran?”
“I have ten boxes of everything,” Eddie says, directing him to the next cabinet, which he reserves for junk food.
Georgie holds up a box of Cap’n Crunch victoriously. “What’s with all the food, anyway?”
Eddie takes a clean bowl from the strainer and a spoon from the silverware drawer and lays them out on the counter before opening the fridge. “Y2K,” he says, trying to decide if the milk has gone bad or not.
“Oh, Mike was freaked about that,” Georgie says through a mouthful of cereal. It appears that he’s disregarded the tableware completely and is eating it straight out of the box.“I kept telling him it was going to be fine.”
“Everyone was ‘freaked’ about it,” Eddie says defensively, closing the fridge. He hadn’t even gone full doomsday prep or anything like that. He just…bought a lot of soup. And withdrew quite a large amount of money from his bank account. “The ramifications could’ve been—”
There’s an awful noise, gurgling water and the sound of screaming, only it’s distorted, somehow, overlapping like a recording that’s been taped over. Then it’s over, and Eddie turns around, hands still clapped over his ears, and Georgie is gone.
Eddie stares at the spot where Georgie was standing. The cereal box sits open on the counter. “Georgie?”
He lets his hands fall, moves to the door, calls out into the hallway. “Georgie!”
The hallway is silent, empty. Eddie holds the door open for a while, breathing heavily. He wishes desperately that Bill
who’s Bill
were there to tell him what to do, because Bill always knew what to do.
By the time he’s re-latched the door chain, Eddie has forgotten why he opened the door in the first place. He reseals the Cap’n Crunch and places it back in the cabinet, returns the bowl and the spoon to their rightful places, wondering why he had taken them out in the first place.
And when he wakes up in the morning with unblemished palms, Eddie finds it very strange that there are pieces of cereal on his kitchen floor.
…
When Eddie gets to the taxi depot that afternoon for his shift, John C flags him down.
“Kaspbrak!” he shouts, waving him over. Eddie’s gotten into a surprising amount of arguments with the other cabbies for a business that doesn’t call for a lot of interaction between employees, but John C is one of the few he gets along with. “Hey, you fix cars, right?”
Eddie nods.
John C sticks a thumb over his shoulder, gesturing at one of the cabs. “Something’s wrong with the CB in 36. All garbled, changing frequencies, kept hearing music in between dispatch calls. Spooked a couple passengers, too. Think you could take a look at it?”
“Yeah, I can look,” Eddie says. Radios aren’t really his area of expertise, and it’s really the company’s responsibility to deal with this type of thing, but the CB is the only way for drivers to communicate and he knows the company won’t do anything about it until it causes a real problem.
Once in the cab, Eddie turns on the radio. The sound that fills the cab is crystal clear, but it’s not the party line, other drivers reporting their locations, dispatcher assigning customers.
It’s something else. A voice Eddie’s heard before, although he can’t recall where.
“Again, this is Richie “Records” Tozier, your favorite weekend disc jock, and you’re listening to KLAD, the sexiest radio station in sunny California. Oh, just got word that I’m not allowed to say that—let’s take a call from a representative for KIIS-FM, which has filed a lawsuit against me for…”
It sounds like someone else is on the radio now, nasally and higher pitched, but Eddie knows it’s still Richie. Richie doing a Voice, like he used to, only Richie’s Voices were always terrible, and this one isn’t. This one is good, really good, and Eddie laughs, for one short, bright moment, before something pops and the sound cuts off.
It’s impossible, Eddie thinks, turning the dial. The radio’s shot, won’t turn back on, but that frequency he just tuned in to was from California. How could a station in California reach his radio in New York?
Richie Tozier. The name
trashmouth
sounds familiar.
Eddie gets out of the car. He can’t explain it, can’t understand it, but he knows he won’t be going to work today. He’s going to do something else.
He’s going to find out who this “Richie Tozier” is.
He has to.