The Mummy Encounter on the Canal

On a frigid January afternoon in 1958, eleven-year-old Ben Hanscom, walking home after helping his teacher count books, paused on a bridge over the frozen Canal in Derry and saw a figure that would haunt his nightmares. Dressed in a white-silver clown suit with oversized orange shoes and pompom buttons, the figure stood on the ice below, holding a bunch of bright balloons. The balloons appeared to float toward Ben despite the strong wind blowing in the opposite direction—an impossibility that signaled the supernatural nature of the encounter. The figure cast no shadow on the ice, and when it called out to Ben in a voice that seemed both heard and telepathic, offering him a balloon and promising a place like Pleasure Island or Never-Never Land where children never have to grow up, Ben felt an overwhelming evil emanating from it. As the clown drew closer, its face was revealed not as painted makeup but as the dried, wrinkled, parchment-like skin of an ancient mummy, with split flesh, dead lips, and eyes that glittered like cold jewels in deep sockets. The creature's hand, bone showing through flaps of skin, reached up and touched the tip of Ben's boot, breaking his paralysis. He fled across the bridge as the five o'clock whistle blew, hearing the mummy-clown climb up behind him, its arid breath and scraping fingernails pursuing him all the way home. Once safely inside, Ben dismissed the experience as a hallucination brought on by the cold and his imagination, but the memory resurfaced in dreams and later, when he told the other Losers about it, he realized it was one of the many forms taken by the entity they had all encountered in different guises—the leper, the werewolf, the dead boys—all manifestations of the same predatory intelligence that fed on children's fears.