IT

In the Tunnels / 2:15 P.M.

Bev and Richie had maybe ten matches between them, but Bill wouldn't let them use them. For the time being, at least, there was still dim light in the dram. Not much, but he could make out the next four feet in front of him, and as long as he could keep doing that, they would save the matches.

He supposed the little light they were getting must be coming from vents in curbings over their heads, maybe even from the circular vents in manhole covers. It seemed surpassingly strange to think they were under the city, but of course by now they must be.

The water was deeper now. Three times dead animals had floated past: a rat, a kitten, a bloated shiny thing that might have been a woodchuck. He heard one of the others mutter disgustedly as that baby cruised by.

The water they were crawling through was relatively placid, but all that was going to come to an end fairly soon: there was a steady hollow roaring not too far up ahead. It grew louder, rising to a one-note roar. The drain elbowed to the right. They made the turn and here were three pipes spewing water into their pipe. They were lined up vertically like the lenses on a traffic light. The drain deadended here. The light was marginally brighter. Bill looked up and saw they were in a square stone-faced shaft about fifteen feet high. There was a sewer-grating up there and water was sloshing down on them in buckets. It was like being in a primitive shower.

Bill surveyed the three pipes helplessly. The top one was venting water which was almost clear, although there were leaves and sticks and bits of trash in it - cigarette butts, chewing-gum wrappers, things like that. The middle pipe was venting gray water. And from the lowest one came a grayish-brown flood of lumpy sewage.

'Eh-Eh-Eddie!'

Eddie floundered up beside him. His hair was plastered to his head. His cast was a soaking, drippy mess.

'Wh-Wh-Which wuh-wuh-one?' If you wanted to know how to build something, you asked Ben; if you wanted to know which way to go, you asked Eddie. They didn't talk about this, but they all knew it. If you were in a strange neighborhood and wanted to get back to a place you knew, Eddie could get you there, making lefts and rights with undiminished confidence until you were reduced simply to following him and hoping that things would turn out right . . . which they always seemed to do. Bill told Richie once that when he and Eddie first began to play in the Barrens, he, Bill, was constantly afraid of getting lost. Eddie had no such fears, and he always brought the two of them out right where he said he was going to. 'If I g-g-got luh-lost in the Hainesville Woods and Eh-Eddie was with me, I wouldn't wuh-hurry a b-bit,' Bill told Richie. 'He just nuh-nuh-knows. My d-d-dad says some people, ih-hit's Hike they got a cuh-huh-hompass in their heads. Eddie's l-l-like that.'

'I can't hear you!' Eddie shouted.

'I said wh-which one?

'Which one what? Eddie had his aspirator clutched in his good hand, and Bill thought he actually looked more like a drowned muskrat than a kid.

'Which one do we tuh-tuh-take?'

'Well, that all depends on where we want to go,' Eddie said, and Bill could have cheerfully throttled him even though the question made perfect sense.

Eddie was looking dubiously at the three pipes. They could fit into all of them, but the bottom one looked pretty snug.

Bill motioned the others to move up into a circle. 'Where the fuck is Ih-Ih-It?' he asked them.

'Middle of town,' Richie said promptly. 'Right under the middle of town.

Near the Canal.'

Beverly was nodding. So was Ben. So was Stan.

'Muh-Muh-Mike?'

'Yes,' he said. 'That's where It is. Near the Canal. Or under it.'

Bill looked back at Eddie. 'W-W-Which one?'

Eddie pointed reluctantly at the lower pipe . . . and although Bill's heart sank, he wasn't at all surprised. 'That one.'

'Oh, gross,' Stan said unhappily. That's a shit-pipe.'

'We don't - ' Mike began, and then broke off. He cocked his head in a listening gesture. His eyes were alarmed.

'What - ' Bill began, and Mike put a finger across his lips in a Shhhh! gesture. Now Bill could hear it too: splashing sounds. Approaching. Grunts and muffled words. Henry still hadn't given up.

'Quick,' Ben said. 'Let's go.'

Stan looked back the way they had come, then he looked at the lowest of the three pipes. He pressed his lips tightly together and nodded. 'Let's go,' he said. 'Shit washes off.'

'Stan the Man Gets Off A Good One!' Richie cried. 'Wacka-wacka-wa - '

'Richie, will you shut up?' Beverly hissed at him.

Bill led them to the pipe, grimacing at the smell, and crawled in. The smell: it was sewage, it was shit, but there was another smell here, too, wasn't there? A lower, more vital smell. If an animal's grunt could have a smell (and, Bill supposed, if the animal in question had been eating the right things, it could), it would be like this undersmell. We're headed in the right direction, all right. It's been here . . . and Its been here a lot.

By the time they had gone twenty feet, the air had grown rancid and poisonous. He squished slowly along, moving through stuff that wasn't mud. He looked back over his shoulder and said, 'You fuh-fuh-follow right behind m-me, Eh-Eh-Eddie. I'll nuh-need y-you.'

The light faded to the faintest gray, held that way briefly, and then it was gone and they were

(out of the blue and)

into the black. Bill shuffled forward through the sunk, feeling that he was almost cutting through it physically, one hand held out before him, part of him expecting that at any moment it would encounter rough hair and green lamplike eyes would open in the darkness. The end would come in one hot flare of pain as It walloped his head off his shoulders.

The dark was stuffed with sounds, all of them magnified and echoing. He could hear his friends shuffling along behind him, sometimes muttering something. There were gurglings and strange clanking groans. Once a flood of sickeningly warm water washed past and between his legs, wetting him to the thighs and rocking him back on his heels. He felt Eddie clutch frantically at the back of his shirt, and then the small flood slackened. From the end of the line Richie bellowed with sorry good humor: 'I think we just been pissed on by the Jolly Green Giant, Bill.'

Bill could hear water or sewage running in controlled bursts through the network of smaller pipes which now must be over their heads. He remembered the conversation about Berry's sewers with his father and thought he knew what this pipe must be - it was to handle the overflow that only occurred during heavy rains and during the flood season. The stuff up there would be leaving Derry to be dumped in Torrault Stream and the Penobscot River. The city didn't like to pump its shit into the Kenduskeag because it made the Canal stink. But all the so-called gray water went into the Kenduskeag, and if there was too much for the regular sewer-pipes to handle, there would be a dump-off . . . like the one that had just happened. If there had been one, there could be another. He glanced up uneasily, not able to see anything but knowing that there must be grates in the top arch of the pipe, possibly in the sides as well, and that any moment there might be -

He wasn't aware he'd reached the end of the pipe until he fell out of it and staggered forward, pinwheeling his arms in a helpless effort to keep his balance. He fell on his belly into a semi-solid mass about two feet below the mouth of the pipe he'd just tumbled out of. Something ran squeaking over his hand. He screamed and sat up, clutching his tingling hand to his chest, aware that a rat had just run over it; he had felt the loathsome, plated drag of the thing's hairless tail.

He tried to stand up and rapped his head on the new pipe's low ceiling. It was a hard hit, and Bill was driven back to his knees with large red flowers exploding in the darkness before his eyes.

'Be c-c-careful!' He heard himself shouting. His words echoed flatly. 'It drops off here! Eh-Eddie! Where a-a-are yuh-you?'

'Here!' One of Eddie's waving hands brushed Bill's nose. 'Help me out, Bill, I can't see! It's - '

There was a huge watery ker-whasssh! Beverly, Mike, and Richie all screamed in unison. In the daylight, the almost perfect harmony the three of them made would have been funny; down here in the dark, in the sewers, it was terrifying. Suddenly all of them were tumbling out. Bill clutched Eddie in a bear-hug, trying to save his arm.

'Oh Christ, I thought I was gonna drown,' Richie moaned. 'We got doused - oh boy, a shit-shower, oh great, they ought to have a class trip down here sometime, Bill, we could get Mr Carson to lead it - '

'And Miss Jimmison could give a health lecture afterward,' Ben said in a trembling voice, and they all laughed shrilly. As the laughter was tapering off, Stan suddenly burst into miserable tears.

'Don't, man,' Richie said, putting a fumbling arm around Stan's sticky shoulders. 'You'll get us all cryin, man.'

'I'm all right!' Stan said loudly, still crying. 'I can stand to be scared, but I hate being dirty like this, I hate not knowing where I am - '

'D-Do y-y-you th-think a-a-any of the muh-matches are still a-a-any guh-good?' Bill asked Richie.

'I gave mine to Bev.'

Bill felt a hand touch his in the darkness and press a folder of matches into it. They felt dry.

'I kept them in my armpit,' she said. 'They might work. You can try them, anyway.'

Bill tore a match out of the folder and struck it. It popped alight and he held it up. His friends were huddled together, wincing at the brief bright flare of light. They were splashed and daubed with ordure and they all looked very young and very afraid. Behind them he could see the sewer-pipe they had come out of. The pipe they were in now was smaller still. It ran straight in both directions, its floor caked with layers of filthy sediment. And -

He drew in a quick hiss and shook the match out as it burned his fingers. He listened and heard the sounds of fast-running water, dripping water, the occasional gushing roar as the overflow valves worked, sending more sewage into the Kenduskeag, which was now God only knew how far behind them. He didn't hear Henry and the others - yet.

He said quietly, 'There's a d-d-dead bob-body on my r-r-right. About t-t-ten fuh-feet a-a-away from uh-us. I think it m-might be Puh-Puh-Puh - '

'Patrick?' Beverly asked, her voice trembling on the edge of hysteria. 'Is it Patrick Hockstetter?'

'Y-Y-Yes. Do you want me to luh-light a-a-another m-match?'

Eddie said, 'You got to, Bill. If I don't see how the pipe runs, I won't know which way to go.'

Bill lit the match. In its glow they all saw the green, swelled thing that had been Patrick Hockstetter. The corpse grinned at them in the dark with horrid chumminess, but with only half a face; sewer rats had taken the rest. Patrick's summer-school books were scattered around him, bloated to the size of dictionaries in the damp.

'Christ,' Mike said hoarsely, his eyes wide.

'I hear them again,' Beverly said. 'Henry and the others.'

The acoustics must have carried her voice to them as well; Henry bellowed down the sewer-pipe and for a moment it was as if he was standing right there.

'We'll getyouuuuuu - '

'You come on right ahead!' Richie shouted. His eyes were bright, dancing, febrile. 'Keep coming, banana-heels! This is just like the YMCA swimming pool down here! Keep - '

Then a shriek of such mad fear and pain came through the pipe that the guttering match fell from Bill's fingers and went out. Eddie's arm had curled around him and Bill hugged Eddie back, feeling his body trembling like a wire as Stan Uris packed close to him on the other side. That shriek rose and rose . . . and then there was an obscene, thick flapping noise, and the shriek was cut off.

'Something got one of them,' Mike choked, horrified, in the darkness. 'Something . . . some monster . . . Bill, we got to get out of here . . . please . . . '

Bill could hear whoever was left - one or two, with the acoustics it was impossible to tell - stumbling and scrabbling through the sewer-pipe toward them. 'Wuh-Which w-w-way, Eh-Eddie?' he asked urgently. 'D-Do you nuh-know?'

'Toward the Canal?' Eddie asked, shaking in Bill's arms.

'Yes!'

To the right. Past Patrick . . . or over him.' Eddie's voice suddenly hardened. 'I don't care that much. He was one of the ones that broke my arm. Spit in my face, too.'

'Let's guh-go,' Bill said, looking back at the sewer-pipe they had just quitted. 'S-Single luh-line! Keep a t-t-touch on e-each uh-uh-other, like b-b-before!'

He groped forward, dragging his right shoulder along the slimy porcelain surface of the pipe, gritting his teeth, not wanting to step on Patrick . . . or into him.

So they crawled farther into the darkness while waters rushed around them and while, outside, the storm walked and talked and brought an early darkness to Derry - a darkness that screamed with wind and stuttered with electric fire and racketed with falling trees that sounded like the death-cries of huge prehistoric creatures.

3

It / May 1985

Now they were coming again, and while everything had gone much as It had foreseen, something It had not foreseen had returned: that maddening, galling fear . . . that sense of Another. It hated the fear, would have turned on it and eaten it if It could have . . . but the fear danced mockingly out of reach, and It could only kill the fear by kitting them.

Surely there was no need for such fear; they were older now, and their number had been reduced from seven to five. Five was a number of power, but it did not have the mystical talismanic quality of seven. It was true that Its dogsbody hadn't been able to kill the librarian, but the librarian would die in the hospital. Later, just before dawn touched the sky, It would send a male nurse with a bad pill habit to finish the librarian once and for all.

The writer's woman was now with It, alive yet not alive - her mind had been utterly destroyed by her first sight of It as It really was, with all of Its little masks and glamours thrown aside - and all of the glamours were only mirrors, of course, throwing back at the terrified viewer the worst thing in his or her own mind, heliographing images as a mirror may bounce a reflection of the sun into a wide unsuspecting eye and stun it to blindness.

Now the mind of the writer's wife was with It, in It, beyond the end of the macroverse; in the darkness beyond the Turtle; in the outlands beyond all lands.

She was in Its eye; she was in Its mind.

She was in the deadlights.

Oh but the glamours were amusing. Hanlon, for instance. He would not remember, not consciously, but his mother could have told him where the bird he had seen at the Ironworks came from. When he was a baby only six months old, his mother had left him sleeping in his cradle in the side yard while she went around back to hang sheets and diapers on the line. His screams had brought her on the run. A large crow had lighted on the edge of the carriage and was pecking at baby Mikey like an evil creature in a nursery tale. He had been screaming in pain and terror, unable to drive away the crow, which had sensed weak prey. She had struck the bird with her fist and driven it off, seen that it had brought blood in two or three places on baby Mikey's arms, and taken him to Dr Stillwagon for a tetanus shot. A part of Mike had remembered that always - tiny baby, giant bird - and when It came to Mike, Mike had seen the giant bird again.

But when the dogsbody husband of the girl from before brought the writer's woman, It had put on no face - It did not dress when It was at home. The dogsbody husband had looked once and had dropped dead of shock, his face gray, his eyes filling with the blood that had squirted out of his brain in a dozen places. The writer's woman had put out one powerful, horrified thought - OH DEAR JESUS IT IS FEMALE - and then all thoughts ceased. She swam in the deadlights. It came down from Its place and took care of her physical remains; prepared them for later feeding. Now Audra Denbrough hung high up in the middle of things, crisscrossed in silk, her head lolling against the socket of her shoulder, her eyes wide and glazed, her toes pointing down.

But there was still power in them. Diminished but still there. They had come here as children and somehow, against all the odds, against all that was supposed to be, all that could be, they had hurt It badly, had almost killed It, had forced It to flee deep into the earth, where it huddled, hurt and hating and trembling in a spreading pool of Its own strange blood.

So another new thing, if you please: for the first time in Its neverending history, It needed to make a plan; for the first time It found Itself afraid simply to take what It wanted from Derry, Its private game-preserve.

It had always fed well on children. Many adults could be used without knowing they had been used, and It had even fed on a few of the older ones over the years - adults had their own terrors, and their glands could be tapped, opened so that all the chemicals of fear flooded the body and salted the meat. But their fears were mostly too complex. The fears of children were simpler and usually more powerful. The fears of children could often be summoned up in a single face . . . and if bait were needed, why, what child did not love a clown?

It understood vaguely that these children had somehow turned Its own tools against It - that, by coincidence (surely not on purpose, surely not guided by the hand of any Other), by the bonding of seven extraordinarily imaginative minds, It had been Drought into a zone of great danger. Any of these seven alone would have been Its meat and drink, and if they had not happened to come together, It surely would have picked them off one by one, drawn by the quality of their minds just as a lion might be drawn to one particular waterhole by the scent of zebra. But together they had discovered an alarming secret that even It had not been aware of: that belief has a second edge. If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one - probably a child - who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home.

Yet in the end It had escaped; had gone deep, and the exhausted, terrified children had elected not to follow It when It was at Its most vulnerable. They had elected to believe It dead or dying, and had retreated.

It was aware of their oath, and had known they would come back just as a lion knows the zebra will eventually return to the waterhole. It had begun to plan even as It began to drowse. When It woke It would be healed, renewed - but their childhoods would be burned away like seven fatty candles. The former power of their imaginations would be muted and weak. They would no longer imagine that there were piranha in the Kenduskeag or that if you stepped on a crack you might really break your mother's back or that if you killed a ladybug which lit on your shin your house would catch fire that night. Instead, they would believe in insurance. Instead, they would believe in wine with dinner - something nice but not too pretentious, like a Pouilly-Fuissé '83, and let that breathe, waiter, would you? Instead, they would believe that Rolaids consume forty-seven times their own weight in excess stomach acid. Instead, they would believe in public television, Gary Hart, running to prevent heart attacks, giving up red meat to prevent colon cancer. They would believe in Dr Ruth when it came to getting well fucked and Jerry Falwell when it came to getting well saved. As each year passed their dreams would grow smaller. And when It woke It would call them back, yes, back, because fear was fertile, its child was rage, and rage cried for revenge.

It would call them and then kill them.

Only now that they were coming, the fear had returned. They had grown up, and their imaginations had weakened - but not as much as It had believed. It had felt an ominous, upsetting growth in their power when they joined together, and It had wondered for the first time if It had perhaps made a mistake.

But why be gloomy? The die was cast and not all the omens were bad. The writer was half-mad for his wife, and that was good. The writer was the strongest, the one who had somehow trained his mind for this confrontation over all the years, and when the writer was dead with his guts falling out of his body, when their precious 'Big Bill' was dead, the others would be Its quickly.

It would feed well . . . and then perhaps It would go deep again. And doze. For awhile.

4

In the Tunnels / 4:30 A.M.

'Bill!' Richie shouted into the echoing pipe. He was moving as fast as he could, but that wasn't very fast. He remembered that as kids they had walked bent over in this pipe, which led away from the pumping-station in the Barrens. He was crawling now, and the pipe seemed impossibly tight. His glasses kept wanting to slide off the end of his nose and he kept pushing them up again. He could hear Bev and Ben behind him.

'Bill!' he bawled again. 'Eddie!'

'I'm here!' Eddie's voice floated back.

'Where's Bill?' Richie shouted.

'Up ahead!' Eddie called. He was very close now, and Richie sensed rather than saw him just ahead. 'He wouldn't wait!'

Richie's head butted Eddie's leg. A moment later Bev's head butted Richie's ass.

'Bill!' Richie screamed at the top of his voice. The pipe channelled his shout and sent it back at him, hurting his own ears. 'Bill, wait for us! We have to go together, don't you know that?'

Faintly, echoing, Bill: 'Audra! Audra! Where are you?'

'Goddam you, Big Bill!' Richie cried softly. His glasses fell off. He cursed, groped for them, and set them, dripping, back on his nose. He pulled in breath and shouted again: 'You'll get lost without Eddie, you fucking asshole! Wait up! Wait up for us! You hear me, Bill? WAIT UP FOR US, DAMMIT!'

There was an agonizing moment of silence. It seemed that no one breathed. All Richie could hear was distant dripping water; the drain was dry this time, except for the occasional stagnant puddle.

'Bill!' He ran a trembling hand through his hair and fought the tears. 'COME ON . . . PLEASE, MAN! WAIT UP! PLEASE!'

And, fainter still, Bill's voice came back: 'I'm waiting.'

Thank God for small favors,' Richie muttered. He slapped Eddie's can. 'Go.'

'I don't know how long I can with just one arm,' Eddie said apologetically.

'Go anyway,' Richie said, and Eddie began crawling again.

Bill, looking haggard and almost used-up, was waiting for them in the sewer-shaft where the three pipes were lined up like lenses on a dead traffic light. There was room enough here for them to stand up.

'Over there,' Bill said. 'Cuh-Criss. And B-B-Belch.'

They looked. Beverly moaned and Ben put an arm around her. The skeleton of Belch Huggins, clad in moldering rags, seemed more or less intact. What remained of Victor was headless. Bill looked across the shaftway and saw a grinning skull.

There it was; there was the rest of him. Should have left it alone, guys,, Bill thought, and shivered.

This section of the sewer system had fallen into disuse; Richie thought the reason why was pretty clear. The waste-treatment plant had taken over. Sometime during the years when they were all busy learning to shave, to drive, to smoke, to fuck around a little, all that good shit, the Environmental Protection Agency had come into being, and the EPA had decided dumping raw sewage - and even gray water - into rivers and streams was a no-no. So this part of the sewer system had simply moldered, and the bodies of Victor Criss and Belch Huggins had moldered along with it. Like Peter Pan's Wild Boys, Victor and Belch had never grown up. Here were the skeletons of two boys in the shredded remains of tee-shirts and jeans that had rotted away to rags. Moss had grown over the warped xylophone of Victor's ribcage, and over the eagle on the buckle of his garrison-belt.

'Monster got em,' Ben said softly. 'Do you remember? We heard it happen.'

'Audra's d-dead.' Bill voice was mechanical. 'I know it.'

'You don't know any such thing!' Beverly said with such fury that Bill stirred and looked at her. 'All you know for sure is that a lot of other people have died, most of them children.' She walked across to him and stood before him with her hands on her hips. Her face and hands were streaked with grime, her hair matted with dirt. Richie thought she looked absolutely magnificent. 'And you know what did it.'

'I nuh-never should have t-t-told her where I was guh-going,' Bill said. 'Why did I do that? Why did I - '

Her hands pistoned out and seized him by the shirt. Amazed, Richie watched as she shook him.

'No more! You know what we came for! We swore, and we're going to do it! Do you understand me, Bill? If she's dead, she's dead . . . but It's not! Now, we need you. Do you get it? We need you!' She was crying now. 'So you stand up for us! You stand up for us like before or none of us are going to get out of here!'

He looked at her for a long time without speaking, and Richie found himself thinking, Come on, Big Bill. Come on, come on -

Bill looked around at the rest of them and nodded. 'Eh-Eddie.'

'I'm here, Bill.'

'D-Do y-you still ruh-remember which p-p-pipe?'

Eddie pointed past Victor and said: 'That the one. Looks pretty small, doesn't it?'

Bill nodded again. 'Can you do it? With your a-a-arm broken?'

'I can for you, Bill.'

Bill smiled: the weariest, most terrible smile Richie had ever seen. 'Tuh-hake us there, Eh-Eddie. Let's g-get it done.'

5

In the Tunnels / 4:55 A.M.

As he crawled, Bill reminded himself of the dropoff at the end of this pipe, but it still surprised him. At one moment his hands were shuffling along the crusted surface of the old pipe; at the next they were skating on air. He pitched forward and rolled instinctively, landing on his shoulder with a painful crunch.

'Be c-c-careful!' he heard himself shouting. 'Here's the druh-hopoff! Eh-Eh-Eddie?'

'Here!' One of Eddie's waving hands brushed across Bill's forehead. 'Can you help me out?'

He got his arms around Eddie and lifted him out, trying to be careful of the bad arm. Ben came next, then Bev, then Richie.

'You got any muh-muh-matches, Ruh-Richie?'

'I do,' Beverly said. Bill felt a hand touch his in the darkness and press a folder of matches into it. 'There's only eight or ten, but Ben's got more. From the room.'

Bill said, 'Did you keep them in your a-a-armpit, B-Bev?'

'Not this time,' she said, and put her arms around him in the dark. He hugged her tight, eyes closed, trying to take the comfort that she wanted so badly to give.

He released her gently and struck a match. The power of memory was great - they all looked at once to their right. What remained of Patrick Hockstetter's body was still there, amid a few lumpy, overgrown things that might have been books. The only really recognizable thing was a jutting semicircle of teeth, two or three of them with fillings.

And something nearby. A gleaming circle barely seen in the match's guttering light.

Bill shook the match out and lit another. He picked it up. 'Audra's wedding ring,' he said. His voice was hollow, expressionless.

The match went out in his ringers.

In the darkness he put the ring on.

'Bill?' Richie said hesitantly. 'Do you have any idea

6

In the Tunnels / 2:20 P.M.

how long they had been wandering through the tunnels under Derry since they had left the place where Patrick Hockstetter's body was, but Bill was sure he could never find his way back. He kept thinking about what his father had said: You could wander for weeks. If Eddie's sense of direction failed them now, they wouldn't need It to kill them; they would wander until they died . . . or, if they got into the wrong set of pipes, until they were drowned like rats in a rain-barrel.

But Eddie didn't seem a bit worried. Every now and then he would ask Bill to light one of their diminishing store of matches, look around thoughtfully, and then set off again. He made rights and lefts seemingly at random. Sometimes the pipes were so big Bill could not reach their tops even by stretching his hand up all the way. Sometimes they had to crawl, and once, for five horrible minutes (which felt more like five hours), they wormed their way along on their bellies, Eddie now leading, the others following with their noses to the heels of the person ahead.

The only thing Bill was completely sure of was that they had somehow gotten into a disused section of the Derry sewer system. They had left all the active pipes either far behind or far above. The roar of running water had dimmed to a far-off thunder. These pipes were older, not kiln-fired ceramic but a crumbly claylike stuff that sometimes oozed springs of unpleasant-smelling fluid. The smells of human waste - those ripe gassy smells that had threatened to suffocate them all - had faded, but they had been replaced by another smell, yellow and ancient, that was worse.

Ben thought it was the smell of the mummy. To Eddie it smelled like the leper. Richie thought it smelled like the world's oldest flannel jacket, now moldering and rotting - a lumberman's jacket, a very big one, big enough for a character like Paul Bunyan, perhaps. To Beverly it smelled like her father's sock-drawer. In Stan Uris it woke a dreadful memory from his earliest childhood - an oddly Jewish memory in a boy who had only the haziest understanding of his own Jewishness. It smelled like clay mixed with oil and made him think of an eyeless, mouthless demon called the Golem, a clay man that renegade Jews were supposed to have raised in the Middle Ages to save them from the goyim who robbed them and raped their women and then sent them packing. Mike thought of the dry smell of feathers in a dead nest.

When they finally reached the end of the narrow pipe, they slithered like eels down the curved surface of another which ran at an oblique angle to the one they had been in, and found they could stand up again. Bill felt the heads of the matches left in the book. Four. His mouth tightened and he resolved not to tell the others how close they were to the end of their light . . . not unless he absolutely had to.

'Huh-Huh-How you g-g-guys d-doin?'

They murmured replies, and he nodded in the dark. No panic, and no tears since Stan's. That was good. He felt for their hands and they stood together in the dark that way for awhile, both taking and giving from the touch. Bill felt clear exultation in this, a sure sense that they were somehow producing more than the sum of their seven selves; they had been re-added into a more potent whole.

He lit one of the remaining matches and they saw a narrow tunnel stretching ahead on a downward slant. The top of this pipe was festooned with sagging cobwebs, some water-broken and hanging in shrouds. Looking at them gave Bill an atavistic chill. The floor here was dry but thick with ancient mold and what might have been leaves, fungus . . . or some unimaginable droppings. Farther up he saw a pile of bones and a drift of green rags. They might once have been that stuff they called 'polished cotton,' workman's clothes. Bill imagined some Sewer Department or Water Department worker who had gotten lost, wandered down here, and been discovered . . .

The match guttered. He tipped its head downward, wanting the light to last a little longer.

'Do y-y-you nuh-know where w-w-we are?' he asked Eddie.

Eddie pointed down the slightly crooked bore of the tunnel. 'Canal's that way,' he said. 'Less'n half a mile, unless this thing turns in a different direction. We're under Up-Mile Hill right now, I think. But Bill - '

The match burned Bill's ringers and he let it drop. They were in darkness again. Someone - Bill thought it was Beverly - sighed. But before the match had gone out, he had seen the worry on Eddie's face.

'W-W-What? What ih-is it?'

'When I say we're under Up-Mile Hill, I mean we're really under it. We been going down for a long time now. Nobody'd ever put sewer-pipe in this deep. When you put a tunnel this deep you call it a mine-shaft.'

'How deep do you figure we are, Eddie?' Richie asked.

'Quarter of a mile,' Eddie said. 'Maybe more.'

'Jesus-please-us,' Beverly said.

'These aren't sewer-pipes, anyway,' Stan said from behind them. 'You can tell by that smell. It's bad, but it's not a sewery smell.'

'I think I'd rather smell the sewer,' Ben said. 'It smells like - '

A scream floated down to them, issuing from the mouth of the pipe they had just left, lifting the hair on the nape of Bill's neck. The seven of them drew together, clutching each other.

' - gonna get you sons of bitches. We're gonna get youuuuuuu -

'Henry,' Eddie breathed. 'Oh my God, he's still coming.'

'I'm not surprised,' Richie said. 'Some people are too stupid to quit.'

They could hear faint panting, the scrape of shoes, the whisper of cloth.

' - youuuuuuuuu -

'Cuh-Cuh-Come on,' Bill said.

They started down the pipe, now walking double except for Mike, who was at the back of the line: Bill and Eddie, Richie and Bev, Ben and Stan.

'H-H-How fuh-far b-b-back do y-you think H-H-Henry ih-his?'

'I couldn't tell, Big Bill,' Eddie said. The echoes are bad.' He dropped his voice. 'Did you see that pile of bones?'

'Y-Y-Yes,' Bill said, dropping his own voice.

There was a tool-belt with the clothes. I think it was a Water Department guy.'

'I guh-guess s-s-so.'

'How long you think - ?'

'I d-d-don't nuh-nuh-know.' I Eddie closed his good hand over Bill's arm in the darkness.

It was perhaps fifteen minutes later when they heard something coming toward them in the dark.

Richie stopped, frozen cold all the way through. Suddenly he was three years old again. He listened to that squelching, shifting movement - closing in on them, closing - and to the whispering branchlike sounds that accompanied it, and even before Bill struck a match he knew what it would be.

'The Eye!' he screamed. 'Christ, it's the Crawling Eye!'

For a moment the others were not sure what they were seeing (Beverly had an impression that her father had found her, even down here, and Eddie had a fleeting vision of Patrick Hockstetter come back to life, somehow Patrick had flanked them and gotten in front of them), but Richie's cry, Richie's certainty, froze the shape for all of them. They saw what Richie saw.

A gigantic Eye filled the tunnel, the glassy black pupil two feet across, the iris a muddy russet color. The white was bulgy, membranous, laced with red veins that pulsed steadily. It was a lidless lashless gelatinous horror that moved on a bed of raw-looking tentacles. These fumbled over the tunnel's crumbly surface and sank in like fingers, so that the impression given in the glow of Bill's guttering match was of an Eye that had somehow grown nightmare fingers which were pulling It along.

It stared at them with blank, feverish avarice. The match went out.

In the darkness, Bill felt those branchlike tentacles caress his ankles, his shins . . . but he could not move. His body was frozen solid. He sensed It approaching, he could feel the heat radiating out from It, and could hear the wet pulse of blood wetting Its membranes. He imagined the stickiness he would feel when It touched him and still he could not scream. Even when fresh tentacles slipped around his waist and hooked themselves into the loops of his jeans and began to drag him forward, he could not scream or struggle. A deadly sleepiness seemed to have suffused his whole body.

Beverly felt one of the tentacles slip around the cup of her ear and suddenly draw noose-tight. Paul flared and she was dragged forward, twisting and moaning, as if an old-lady schoolteacher were giving her an out-of-patience come-along to the back of the room, where she would be forced to sit on a stool and wear a duncecap. Stan and Richie tried to back away, but a forest of unseen tentacles now wavered and whispered about them. Ben put an arm around Beverly and tried to tug her back. She clasped his hands with panicky tightness.

'Ben . . . Ben, It's got me . . . '

'No It don't . . . Wait . . . I'll pull . . . '

He pulled with all his might, and Beverly screamed as pain tore through her ear and blood began to flow. A tentacle, dry and hard, scraped over Ben's shirt, paused, then twisted in a painful knot around his shoulder.

Bill put out a hand, and it slapped into a gluey yielding wetness. The Eye! his mind screamed. Oh God I got my hand in the Eye! Oh God! Oh dear sweet God! The Eye! My hand in the Eye!

He began to fight now, but the tentacles drew him forward inexorably. His hand disappeared into that wet avid heat. His forearm. Now his arm was lunged into the Eye up to the elbow. At any moment the rest of his body would come against that sticky surface and he felt that he would go mad in that instant. He fought frantically, chopping at the tentacles with his other hand.

Eddie stood like a boy in a dream, hearing the muffled screams and sounds of struggle as his friends were being pulled in. He sensed the tentacles around him but none had as yet actually landed on him.

Run home! his mind commanded him quite loudly. Run home to your mamma, Eddie! You can find the way!

Bill screamed in the dark - a high, despairing sound that was followed by hideous squishings and slobberings.

Eddie's paralysis broke wide open - It was trying to take Big Bill!

'No!' Eddie bellowed - it was a full-blown roar. One might never have guessed such a Norse-warrior sound could issue from such a thin chest, Eddie Kaspbrak's chest, Eddie Kaspbrak's lungs, which were of course afflicted with the most terrible case of asthma in Derry. He bolted forward, jumping over questing tentacles without seeing them, his broken arm thumping his own chest as it swung back and forth in its soggy cast. He fumbled in his pocket and brought out his aspirator.

(acid that's what it tastes like acid acid battery acid)

He collided with Bill Denbrough's back and slammed him aside. There was a watery ripping sound, followed by a low eager mewling that Eddie did not so much hear with his ears as feel with his mind. He raised the aspirator

(acid it's acid if I want it to be so eat it eat it eat)

'BATTERY ACID, FUCKNUTS!' Eddie screamed, and triggered off a blast. At the same time he kicked at the Eye. His foot went deep into the jelly of Its cornea. There was a gush of hot fluid over his leg. He pulled his foot back, only dimly aware that he had lost his shoe.

'FUCK OFF! CRAM IT, SAM! GO AWAY, JOSÉ! GET LOST! FUCK OFF!'

He felt tentacles touch him, but tentatively. He triggered the aspirator again, coating the Eye, and felt/heard that mewling again . . . now a hurt, surprised sound.

'Fight It!' Eddie raved at the others. 'It's just a fucking Eye! Fight It! You hear me? Fight It, Bill! Kick the shit out of the sucker! Jesus Christ you fucking pussies I'm doing the Mashed Potatoes all over It AND I GOT A BROKEN ARM!'

Bill felt his strength return. He ripped his dripping arm out of the Eye . . . and then slammed it, fist-first, back in. A moment later Ben was beside him. He ran into the Eye, grunted with surprise and disgust, and then began to rain punches onto its jellied quivering surface. 'Let her go!' he yelled. 'You hear me? Let her go! Get outta here! Get outta here!'

'Just an Eye! Just a fucking Eye!' Eddie was screaming deliriously. He triggered his aspirator again and felt It draw back. The tentacles which had settled on him now dropped away. 'Richie! Richie! Get it! It's just an Eye!'

Richie stumbled forward, unable to believe he was doing this, actually approaching the worst, most terrible monster in the world. But he was.

He only threw a single weak punch, and the feel of his fist sinking into the Eye - it was thick and wet and somehow gristly - made him throw his guts up in one big tasteless convulsion. A sound came out of him - glurt! - and the thought that he'd actually puked on the Eye caused him to do it again. It was only a single punch, but since he had created this particular monster, perhaps that was all that was necessary. Suddenly the tentacles were gone. They could hear It withdrawing . . . and then the only sounds were Eddie panting and Beverly crying softly, one hand to her bleeding ear.

Bill struck one of their three remaining matches and they stared at each other with dazed, shocked faces. Bill's left arm was running with a thick, cloudy goo that looked like a mixture of partially congealed eggwhite and snot. Blood was trickling slowly down the side of Beverly's neck, and there was a fresh cut on Ben's cheek. Richie slowly pushed his glasses up on his nose.

'A-A-Are we all ruh-ruh-right?' Bill asked hoarsely.

'Are you, Bill?' Richie asked.

'Y-Y-Yeah.' He turned to Eddie and hugged the smaller boy with fierce intensity. 'You suh-suh-saved my luh-life, man.'

'It ate your shoe,' Beverly said, and uttered a wild laugh. 'Isn't that too bad.'

'I'll buy you a new pair of Keds when we get out of here,' Richie said. He clapped Eddie on the back in the dark. 'How did you do it, Eddie?'

'Shot it with my aspirator. Pretended it was acid. That's how it tastes after awhile if I'm having, you know, a bad day. Worked great.'

'"I'm doing the Mashed Potatoes all over It and I GOT A BROKEN ARM," Richie said, and giggled madly. 'Not too shabby, Eds. Actually pretty chuckalicious, tell you what.'

'I hate it when you call me Eds.'

'I know,' Richie said, hugging him tightly, 'but somebody has to toughen you up, Eds. When you stop leading the sheltered igszistence of a child and grow up, you gonna, Ah say, Ah say you gonna find out life ain't always this easy, boy!'

Eddie began to shriek with laughter. 'That's the shittiest Voice I ever heard, Richie.'

'Well, keep that aspirator thing handy,' Beverly said. 'We might need it again.'

'You didn't see It anywhere?' Mike asked. 'When you lit the match?'

'Ih-Ih-It's g-g-gone,' Bill said, and then added grimly: 'But we're getting close to It. To the pluh-hace where Ih-It stuh-stuh-stays. And I th-think we h-h-hurt Ih-hit th-that time.'

'Henry's still coming,' Stan said. His voice was low and hoarse. 'I can hear him back there.'

'Then let's move out,' Ben said.

They did. The tunnel progressed steadily downward, and that smell - that low wild stench - grew steadily stronger. At times they could hear Henry behind them, but now his cries seemed far away and not at all important. There was a feeling in all of them - similar to that feeling of skew and disconnection they had felt in the house on Neibolt Street - that they had progressed over the edge of the world and into some queer nothingness. Bill felt (although he did not have the vocabulary to express what he knew) that they were approaching Derry's dark and ruined heart.

It seemed to Mike Hanlon that he could almost feel that heart's diseased, arrhythmic beat. Beverly felt a sense of evil power growing around her, seeming to enfold her, certainly trying to split her off from the others and make her alone. Nervously, she reached out on either side of herself and clasped Bill's hand and Ben's. It seemed to her that she had to reach too far, and she called out nervously: 'Hang onto hands! It's like we're moving away from each other!'

It was Stan who first realized he could see again. There was a low, strange radiance in the air. At first he could only see hands - his, clasping Ben's on one side and Mike's on the other. Then he realized he could see the buttons on Richie's muddy shirt and the Captain Midnight ring - just some junky cereal-box prize - that Eddie liked to wear on his little finger.

'Can you guys see?' Stan asked, coming to a stop. The others stopped, too. Bill looked around, first aware that he could see - a little, anyway - and then that the tunnel had widened out amazingly. They were now in a curved chamber easily as big as the Sunnier Tunnel in Boston. Bigger, he amended as he looked around with a growing sense of awe.

They craned their necks back to see the ceiling, which was now fifty feet or more above them, and held up by outcurving buttresses of stone like ribs. Nets of dirty cobweb hung between them. The floor was now stone-flagged, but overlaid with such a drift of ancient dirt that the quality of their footfalls had never changed. The up-curving walls were easily fifty feet away on either side.

'Waterworks must have really gone crazy down here,' Richie said, and laughed uneasily.

'Looks like a cathedral,' Beverly said softly.

'Where's the light coming from?' Ben wanted to know.

'Coming r-right out of the w-w-walls, looks l-like,' Bill said.

'I don't like it,' Stan said.

'Let's guh-go. H-H-Henry'll be breathing d-d-down our nuh-necks - '

A loud, braying cry split the gloom, and then the ruffling, heavy thunder of wings. A shape came cruising out of the dark, one eye glaring - the other was a dark lamp.

'The bird!' Stan screamed. 'Look out, it's the bird!'

It dived at them like an obscene fighter-plane, Its plated orange beak opening and closing to reveal the pink inner lining of Its mouth, plush as a satin pillow in a coffin.

It went straight for Eddie.

Its beak raked his shoulder and he felt pain sink into his flesh like acid. Blood flowed down his chest. He cried out as the backwash of Its beating wings blew noxious tunnel air in his face. It wheeled back, Its eye glaring malevolently, rolling in Its socket, blurring only as Its nictitating eyelid jittered down momentarily to cover the eye with tissue-thin film. Its claws sought Eddie, who ducked, screaming. They razored through the back of his shirt, cutting it open, drawing shallow scarlet lines along his shoulderblades. Eddie yelled and tried to crawl away but the bird wheeled back again.

Mike broke forward, digging in his pocket. He came out with a one-blade Buck knife. As the bird dived on Eddie again, he swept it in a quick, tight arc across one of the bird's talons. It cut deep, and blood poured out. The bird banked away and then came back, folding Its wings, diving in like a bullet. Mike fell to one side at the last moment, slashing upward with the Buck knife. He missed, and the bird's claw hit his wrist with such force that his hand went numb and tingly - the bruise that later bloomed there went most of the way to his elbow. The Buck flew into the dark.

The bird came back, screeching triumphantly, and Mike rolled his body over Eddie's and waited for the worst.

Stan walked forward toward the two boys huddled on the floor as the bird returned. He stood, small and somehow trim in spite of the dirt grimed into his hands and arms and pants and shirt, and suddenly held his hands out in a curious gesture - palms up, fingers down. The bird uttered another squawk and sheared off, bulleting by Stan, missing him by inches, lifting his hair and then dropping it in the buffeting wake of Its passage. He turned in a tight circle to face Its return.

'I believe in scarlet tanagers even though I never saw one,' he said in a high clear voice. The bird screamed and banked away as if he'd shot at it. 'Same with vultures, and the New Guinea mudlark and the flamingos of Brazil.' The bird screamed, circled, and suddenly flew on up the tunnel, squawking. 'I believe in the golden bald eagle!' Stan screamed after it. 'And I think there really might be a phoenix somewhere! But I don't believe in you, so get the fuck out of here! Get out! Hit the road, Jack!'

He stopped then, and the silence seemed very large.

Bill, Ben, and Beverly went to Mike and Eddie; they helped Eddie to his feet and Bill looked at the cuts. 'Nuh-not d-d-deep,' he said. 'But I b-bet they h-hurt like h-h-hell.'

'It tore my shirt to pieces, Big Bill.' Eddie's cheeks glistened with tears, and he was wheezing again. The bellowing barbarian's voice was gone; it was hard to believe it had ever been there. 'What am I going to tell my mom?'

Bill smiled a little. 'Why d-d-don't we wuh-worry about that when we g-g-g-get out of here? Give yourself a bluh-hast, E-Eddie.'

Eddie did, inhaling deeply and then wheezing.

'That was great, man,' Richie told Stan. 'That was just frockin greatl'

Stan was shivering all over. 'There's no bird like that, that's all. There never has been and there never will be.'

'We're coming!' Henry screamed from behind them. His voice was utterly demented. He was laughing and howling now. He sounded like something that has crawled out of a crack in the roof of hell. 'Me'n Belch! We're coming and we'll get you little punks! You can't get away!'

Bill shouted: 'G-G-Get out, H-H Henry! W-W-While there's still tuh-tuh-time!'

Henry's response was a hollow, inarticulate scream. They heard a hustle of footsteps and in a burst of comprehension Bill understood Henry's whole purpose: he was real, he was mortal, he could not be stopped by an aspirator or a bird-book. Magic would not work on Henry. He was too stupid.

'C-C-Come oh-on. We guh-gotta stay a-a-ahead of h-h-him.'

They went on again, holding hands, Eddie's tattered shirt flapping behind him. The light grew brighter, the tunnel ever huger. As it canted downward, the ceiling flew away above until they could barely see it. It now seemed to them that they were not walking in a tunnel at all but making their way through a titanic underground courtyard, the approach to some cyclopean castle. The light from the walls had become a running green-yellow fire. The smell was stronger, and they began to pick up a vibration that might have been real or might have been only in their minds. It was steady and rhythmic.

It was a heartbeat.

'It ends up ahead!' Beverly cried. 'Look! It's a blank wall!'

But as they drew closer, antlike now on this great floor of dirty stone blocks, each block bigger than Bassey Park, it seemed, they saw that the wall was not entirely blank after all. It was broken by a single door. And although the wall itself towered hundreds of feet above them, the door was very small. It was no more than three feet high, a door of the sort you might see in a fairytale book, made of stout oaken boards bound with iron strips in an X-pattern. It was, they all realized at once, a door made only for children.

Ghostly, in his mind, Ben heard the librarian reading to the little ones: Who is that trip-trapping upon my bridge? The children lean forward, all the old fascination glistening in their eyes: will the monster be bested . . . or will It feed?

There was a mark on the door, and heaped at its foot was a pile of bones. Small bones. The bones of God alone knew how many children.

They had come to the place of It.

The mark on the door, then: what was that?

[Image of an alien mark, rather like a chinese symbol]

Bill marked it as a paper boat.

Stan saw it as a bird rising toward the sky - a phoenix, perhaps.

Michael saw a hooded face - that of crazy Butch Bowers, perhaps, if it could only be seen.

Richie saw two eyes behind a pair of spectacles.

Beverly saw a hand doubled up into a fist.

Eddie believed it to be the face of the leper, all sunken eyes and wrinkled snarling mouth - all disease, all sickness, was stamped into that face.

Ben Hanscom saw a tattered pile of wrappings and seemed to smell old sour spices.

Later, arriving at that same door with Belch's screams still echoing in his ears, alone at the end of it, Henry Bowers would see it as the moon, full, ripe . . . and black.

'I'm scared, Bill,' Ben said in a wavering voice. 'Do we have to?'

Bill toed the bones, and suddenly scattered them in a powdery, raiding drift with one foot. He was scared, too . . . but there was George to consider. It had ripped off George's arm. Were those small and fragile bones among these? Yes, of course they were.

They were here for the owners of the bones, George and all the others - those who had been brought here, those who might be brought here, those who had been left in other places simply to rot.

'We have to,' Bill said.

'What if it's locked?' Beverly asked in a small voice.

'Ih-It's not l-locked,' Bill said, and then told her what he knew from deeper inside: 'Pluh-haces like this are n-never luh-luh-locked.'

He placed the tented fingers of his right hand on the door and pushed. It swung open on a flood of sick yellow-green light. That zoo smell wafted out at them, incredibly strong, incredibly potent now.

One by one they passed through the fairytale door, and into the lair of It. Bill

7

In the Tunnels / 4:59 A.M.

stopped so suddenly that the others piled up like freight-cars when the engine suddenly comes to a panic-stop. 'What is it?' Ben called.

'Ih-Ih-It was h-h-here. The Eh-Eh-Eye. D-Do you r-r-remember?'

'I remember,' Richie said. 'Eddie stopped it with his aspirator. By pretending it was acid. He said something about some dance. Pretty chuckalicious, but I can't remember exactly what it was.'

'It d-d-doesn't m-m-matter. We won't suh-see anything we saw b-b-before,' Bill said. He struck a light and looked around at the others. Their faces were luminous in the glow of the match, luminous and mystic. And they seemed very young. 'H-H-How you guys d-doin?'

'We're okay, Big Bill,' Eddie said, but his face was drawn with pain. Bill's makeshift splint was coming apart. 'How bout you?'

'Oh-Oh-kay,' Bill said, and shook out the match before his face could tell them any different story.

'How did it happen?' Beverly asked him, touching his arm in the dark. 'Bill, how could she - ?'

'B-B-Because I muh-hentioned the n-name of the town. Sh-She c-c-came ah-hafter m-m-me. Even wh-when I was d-d-doing it, suh-suh-homething ih-hinside was t-t-telling me to sh-sh-shut uh-up. B-But I d-d-didn't luh-luh-histen.' He shook his head helplessly in the dark. 'But even if sh-she came to Duh-Duh-Derry, I d-d-don't uh-hunderstand h-h-how she c-could have guh-hotten d-d-down h-here. If H-H-Henry dih-didn't b-b-bring her, then who d-did?'

'It,' Ben said. 'It doesn't have to look bad, we know that. It could have shown up and said you were in trouble. Taken her here in order to . . . to fuck you up, I suppose. To kill our guts. Cause that's what you always were, Big Bill. Our guts.'

'Tom?' Beverly said in a low, almost musing voice.

'W-W-Who? Bill struck another match.

She was looking at him with a kind of desperate honesty. 'Tom. My husband. He knew, too. At least, I think I mentioned the name of the town to him, the way you mentioned it to Audra. I . . . I don't know if it took or not. He was pretty angry with me at the time.'

'Jesus, what is this, some kind of soap opera where everybody turns up sooner or later?' Richie said.

'Not a soap opera,' Bill said, sounding sick, 'a show. Like the circus. Bev here went and married Henry Bowers. When she left, why wouldn't he come here? After all, the real Henry did.'

'No,' Beverly said. 'I didn't marry Henry. I married my father.'

'If he beat on you, what's the difference?' Eddie asked.

'C-C-Come around me,' Bill said. 'Muh-muh-move in.'

They did. Bill reached out to either side and found Eddie's good hand and one of Richie's hands. Soon they stood in a circle, as they had done once before when their number was greater. Eddie felt someone put an arm around his shoulders. The feeling was warm and comforting and deeply familiar.

Bill felt the sense of power that he remembered from before, but understood with some desperation that things really had changed. The power was nowhere near as strong - it struggled and flickered like a candle-flame in foul air. The darkness seemed thicker and closer to them, more triumphant. And he could smell It. Down this passageway, he thought, and not so terribly far, is a door with a mark on it. What was behind that door? It's the one thing I still can't remember. I can remember making my fingers stiff, because they wanted to tremble, and I can remember pushing the door open. I can even remember the flood of light that streamed out and how it seemed almost alive, as if it wasn't just light but fluorescent snakes. I remember the smell, like the monkey-house in a big zoo, but even worse. And then . . . nothing.

'Do a-a-any of y-y-y-you rem-m-member what It really w-w-was?'

'No,' Eddie said.

'I think . . . ' Richie began, and then Bill could almost feel him shake his head in the dark. 'No.'

'No,' Beverly said.

'Huh-uh.' That was Ben. 'That's the one thing I still can't remember. What It was . . . or how we fought It.'

'Chüd,' Beverly said. That's how we fought it. But I don't remember what that means.'

'Stand by m-me,' Bill said, 'and I-I'll stuh-stuh-hand by y-y-you guys.'

'Bill,' Ben said. His voice was very calm. 'Something is coming.'

Bill listened. He heard dragging, shambling footsteps approaching them in the dark . . . and he was afraid.

'A-A-Audra?' he called . . . and knew already that it was not her.

Whatever was shambling toward them drew closer.

Bill struck a light.

8

Derry / 5:00 A.M.

The first wrong thing happened on that late-spring day in 1985 two minutes before official sunrise. To understand how wrong it was one would have to have known two facts that were known to Mike Hanlon (who lay unconscious in the Derry Home Hospital as the sun came up), both concerning the Grace Baptist Church, which had stood on the corner of Witcham and Jackson since 1897. The church was topped with a slender white spire which was the apotheosis of every Protestant church-steeple in New England. There were clock-faces on all four sides of the steeple-base, and the clock itself had been constructed and shipped from Switzerland in the year 1898. The only one like it stood in the town square of Haven Village, forty miles away.

Stephen Bowie, a timber baron who lived on West Broadway, donated the clock to the town at a cost of some $17,000. Bowie could afford it. He was a devout churchgoer and deacon for forty years (during several of those later years he was also president of Derry's Legion of White Decency chapter). In addition, he was known for his devout layman sermons on Mother's Day, which he always referred to reverently as Mother's Sunday.

From the time of its installation until May 31st, 1985, that clock had faithfully chimed each hour and each half - with one notable exception. On the day of the explosion at the Kitchener Ironworks it had not chimed the noon-hour. Residents believed that the Reverend Jollyn had silenced the clock to show that the church was in mourning for the dead children, and Jollyn never disabused them of this notion, although it was not true. The clock had simply not chimed.

Nor did it chime the hour of five on the morning of May 31st, 1985.

At that moment, all over Derry, old-timers opened their eyes and sat up, disturbed for no reason they could put their fingers on. Medicines were gulped, false teeth put in, pipes and cigars lit.

The old folks stood a watch.

One of them was Norbert Keene, now in his nineties. He hobbled to the window and looked out at a darkening sky. The weather report the night before had called for clear skies, but his bones told him it was going to rain, and hard. He felt scared, deep inside him; in some obscure way he felt threatened, as if a poison were working its way relentlessly toward his heart. He thought randomly of the day the Bradley Gang had ridden heedlessly into Derry, into the sights of seventy-five pistols and rifles. That kind of work left a man feeling kind of warm and lazy inside, like everything was . . . was somehow confirmed. He couldn't put it any better than that, even to himself. Work like that left a man feeling like he maybe might live forever, and Norbert Keene damn near had. Ninety-six years old come June 24th, and he still walked three miles every day. But now he felt scared.

'Those kids,' he said, looking out his window, unaware he had spoken. 'What is it with them damn kids? What they monkeying around with this time?'

Egbert Thoroughgood, ninety-nine, who had been in the Silver Dollar when Claude Heroux tuned up his axe and played 'The Dead March' for four men on it, awoke at the same moment, sat up, and let out a rusty scream that no one heard. He had dreamed of Claude, only Claude had been coming after him, and the axe had come down, and a moment after it did Thoroughgood had seen his own severed hand twitching and curling on the counter.

Something wrong, he thought in his muddy way, frightened and shaking all over in his pee-stained longjohns. Something dreadful wrong.

Dave Gardener, who had discovered George Denbrough's mutilated body in October of 1957 and whose son had discovered the first victim of this new cycle earlier in the spring, opened his eyes on the stroke of five and thought, even before looking at the clock on the bureau: Grace Church clock didn't chime the hour . . . What's wrong? He felt a large ill-defined fright. Dave had prospered over the years; in 1965 he had purchased The Shoeboat, and now there was a second Shoeboat at the Derry Mall and a third up in Bangor. Suddenly all of those things - things he had spent his life working for - seemed in jeopardy. From what? he cried to himself, looking at his sleeping wife. From what, why you so goddam antsy just because that clock didn't chime? But there was no answer.

He got up and went to the window, hitching at the waistband of his pyjamas. The sky was restless with clouds racing in from the west, and Dave's disquiet grew. For the first time in a very long while he found himself thinking of the screams that had brought him to his porch twenty-seven years ago, to see that writhing figure in the yellow rainslicker. He looked at the approaching clouds and thought: We're in danger. All of its. Derry.

Chief Andrew Rademacher, who really believed he had tried his best to solve the new string of child-murders that had plagued Derry, stood on the porch of his house, thumbs in his Sam Browne belt, looking up at the clouds, and felt the same disquiet. Something getting ready to happen. Looks like it's going to pour buckets, for one thing. But that's not all. He shuddered . . . and as he stood there on his porch, the smell of the bacon his wife was cooking wafting out through the screen door, the first dime-sized drops of rain darkened the sidewalk in front of his pleasant Reynolds Street home and, somewhere just over the horizon from Bassey Park, thunder rumbled.

Rademacher shivered again.

9

George / 5:01 A.M.

Bill held the match up . . . and uttered a long trembling despairing screech.

It was George wavering up the tunnel toward him, George, still dressed in his blood-spattered yellow rainslicker. One sleeve dangled limp and useless. George's face was white as cheese and his eyes were shiny silver. They fixed on Bill's own.

'My boat!' Georgie's lost voice rose, wavering, in the tunnel. 'I can't find it, Bill, I've looked everywhere and I can't find it and now I'm dead and it's your fault your fault YOUR FAULT - '

'Juh-Juh-Georgie!' Bill shrieked. He felt his mind tottering, ripping free of its moorings.

George stumble-staggered toward him and now his one remaining arm rose toward Bill, the white hand at the end of it hooked into a claw. The nails were dirty and grasping.

'Your fault,' George whispered, and grinned. His teeth were fangs; they opened and closed slowly, like the teeth in a beartrap. 'You sent me out and it's all . . . your . . . fault.'

'Nuh-Nuh-No, Juh Juh-Georgie!' Bill cried. 'I dih-dih-didn't nuh-hun-nuh-know - '

'Kill you!' George cried, and a mixture of doglike sounds came out of that fanged mouth: yips, yelps, howls. A kind of laughter. Bill could smell him now, could smell George rotting. It was a cellar-smell, squirmy, the smell of some final monster standing slumped and yellow-eyed in the corner, waiting to unzip some small boy's guts.

George's teeth gnashed together. The sound was like billiard balls clicking off one another. Yellow pus began to leak from his eyes and dribble down his face . . . and the match went out.

Bill felt his friends disappear - they were running, of course they were, they were leaving him alone. They were cutting him off, as his parents had cut him off because George was right: it was all his fault. Soon he would feel that single hand seize his throat, soon he would feel those fangs pulling him open, and that would be right. That would be only just. He had sent George out to die and he had spent his whole adult life writing about the horror of that betrayal - oh, he had put many faces on it, almost as many faces as It had put on for their benefit, but the monster at the bottom of everything was only George, running out into the receding flood with his paraffin-coated paper boat. Now would come the atonement.

'You deserve to die for killing me,' George whispered. He was very close now. Bill closed his eyes.

Then yellow light splashed the tunnel and he opened them. Richie was holding up a match. 'Fight It, Bill!' Richie shouted. 'God's sake! Fight It!'

What are you doing here? He looked at them, bewildered. They hadn't run after all. How could that be? How could that be after they had seen how foully he had murdered his own brother?

'Fight It!' Beverly was screaming. 'Oh Bill, fight It! Only you can do this one! Please - '

George was less than five feet away now. He suddenly stuck his tongue out at Bill. It was crawling with white fungoid growths. Bill screamed again.

'Kill It, Bill!' Eddie shouted. 'That's not your brother! Kill It while it's small! Kill It NOW!'

George glanced at Eddie, cutting his shiny-silver eyes that way for just a moment, and Eddie reeled back and struck the wall as if he had been pushed. Bill stood mesmerized, watching his brother come toward him, George again after all these years, it was George at the end as it had been George at the beginning, oh yes, and he could hear the creak of George's yellow slicker as George closed the distance, he could hear the jingle of the buckles on his overshoes and he could smell something like wet leaves, as if underneath the slicker George's body was made of them, as if the feet inside George's galoshes were leaf-feet, yes, a leaf-man, that was it, that was George, he was a rotted balloon face and a body made of dead leaves, the kind that sometimes choke the sewers after a flood.

Dimly he heard Beverly shriek.

(he thrusts his fists)

'Bill, please Bill - '

(against the posts and still insists)

'We'll look for my boat together,' George said. Thick yellow pus, mock tears, rolled down his cheeks. He reached for Bill and his head cocked sideward, his teeth peeling back from those fangs.

(he sees the ghosts he sees the ghosts HE SEES)

'We'll find it,' George said and Bill could smell Its breath and it was a smell like exploded animals lying on the highway at midnight. As George's mouth yawned, he could see things squirming around inside there. 'It's still down here, everything floats down here, we'll float, Bill, we'll all float - '

George's fishbelly hand closed on Bill's neck.

(HE SEES THE GHOSTS WE SEE THE GHOSTS THEY WE YOU SEE THE GHOSTS - )

George's contorted face drifted toward Bill's neck.

' - float - '

'He thrusts his fists against the posts!' Bill cried. His voice was deeper, hardly his own at all, and in a searing flash of memory Richie remembered that Bill only stuttered in his own voice: when he pretended to be someone else, he never did.

The George-thing recoiled, hissing, Its hand going to Its face in a warding-off gesture.

'That's it!' Richie screamed deliriously. 'You got It, Bill! Get It! Get It! Get It!'

'He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts!' Bill thundered. He advanced on the George-thing. 'You're no ghost! George knows I didn't mean for him to die! My folks were wrong! They took it out on me and that was wrong! Do you hear me?'

The George-thing abruptly turned, squealing like a rat. It began to run and ripple under the yellow slicker. The slicker itself seemed to be dripping, running in bright blots of yellow. It was losing Its shape, becoming amorphous.

'He thrusts his fists against the posts, you son of a bitch!' Bill Denbrough screamed, 'and still insists he sees the ghosts!' He leaped at It and his fingers snagged in the yellow rainslicker that was no longer a rainslicker. What he grabbed felt like some strange warm taffy that melted under his fingers as soon as he had closed his fist around it. He fell to his knees. Then Richie yelled as the guttering match burned his fingers and they were plunged into darkness again.

Bill felt something begin to grow in his chest, something hot and choking and as painful as fiery nettles. He gripped his knees and drew them up to his chin, hoping it would stop the pain, or perhaps ease it; he was dimly thankful for the dark, glad that the others couldn't see this agony.

He heard a sound escape him - a wavering moan. There was a second; a third. 'George!' he cried. George, I'm sorry! I never meant for anything b-b-b-bad to huh-huh-happen!'

Perhaps there was something else to say, but he could not say it. He was sobbing then, lying on his back with one arm over his eyes, remembering the boat, remembering the steady beat of the rain against his bedroom windows, remembering the medicines and the tissues on the nighttable, the faint ache of fever in his head and in his body, remembering George, most of all that: remembering George, George in his yellow hooded slicker.

'George, I'm sorry!' he cried through his tears. 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please, I'm suh-suh-SORRY - '

And then they were around him, his friends, and no one lit a match, and someone held him, he didn't know who, Beverly maybe, or maybe Ben, or Richie. They were with him, and for that little while the darkness was kind.

10

Derry / 5:30 A.M.

By 5:30 it was raining hard. The weather forecasters on the Bangor radio stations expressed mild surprise and tendered mild apologies to all the people who had made plans for picnics and outings on the basis of yesterday's forecasts. Tough break, folks; just one of those odd weather patterns that sometimes developed in the Penobscot Valley with startling suddenness.

On WZON, meteorologist Jim Witt described what he called an 'extraordinarily disciplined' low-pressure system. That was putting it mildly. Conditions went from cloudy in Bangor to showery in Hampden to drizzly in Haven to moderate rain in Newport. But in Derry, only thirty miles from downtown Bangor, it was pouring. Travellers on Route 7 found themselves moving through water that was eight inches deep in places, and beyond the Rhulin Farms a plugged culvert in a dip had covered the highway with so much water that the highway was actually impassable. By six that morning the Derry Highway Patrol had orange DETOUR signs on both sides of the dip.

Those who waited under the shelter on Main Street for the first bus of the day to take them to work stood looking over the railing at the Canal, where the water was ominously high in its concrete channel. There would be no flood, of course; all agreed on that. The water was still four feet below the high-water mark of 1977, and there had been no flood that year. But the rain came down with steady pounding persistence, and thunder grumbled in the low clouds. Water ran down Up-Mile Hill in streams and roared in the stormdrains and sewers.

No flood, they agreed, but there was a patina of unease on every face.

At 5:45 a power-transformer on a pole beside the abandoned Tracker Brothers' Truck Depot exploded in a flash of purple light, spraying twisted chunks of metal onto the shingled roof. One of the flying chunks of metal severed a high-tension wire, which also fell on the roof, spluttering and twisting like a snake, shooting an almost liquid stream of sparks. The roof caught fire in spite of the downpour, and soon the depot was blazing. The power-cable tumbled from the roof to the weedy verge that led around to the lot where small boys had once played baseball. The Derry Fire Department rolled for the first time that day at 6:02 A.M. and arrived at Tracker Brothers' at 6:09. One of the first firemen off the truck was Calvin Clark, one of the Clark twins with whom Ben, Beverly, Richie, and Bill had gone to school. His third step away from the truck brought the sole of his leather boot down on the live line. Calvin was electrocuted almost instantly. His tongue popped out of his mouth and his rubber fireman's coat began to smolder. He smelled like burning tires at the town dump.

At 6:05 A.M., residents of Merit Street in the Old Cape felt something that might have been an underground explosion. Plates fell from shelves and pictures from walls. At 6:06, every toilet on Merit Street suddenly exploded in a geyser of shit and raw sewage as some unimaginable reversal took place in the pipes which fed the holding tanks of the new waste-treatment plant in the Barrens. In some cases these explosions were strong enough to tear holes in bathroom ceilings. A woman named Anne Stuart was killed when an ancient gear-wheel catapulted from her toilet along with a gout of sewage. The gearwheel went through the frosted glass of the shower door and passed through her throat like a terrible bullet as she washed her hair. She was nearly decapitated. The gear-wheel was a relic of the Kitchener Ironworks, and had found its way into the sewers almost three-quarters of a century before. Another woman was killed when the sudden violent reversal of sewage, driven by expanding methane gases, caused her toilet to explode like a bomb. The unfortunate woman, who was sitting on the John at the time and reading the current Banana Republic catalogue, was torn to pieces.

At 6:19 A.M., a bolt of lightning struck the so-called Kissing Bridge, which spanned the Canal between Bassey Park and Derry High School. The splintered pieces were thrown high into the air and then rained down into the swiftly moving Canal to be carried away.

The wind was rising. At 6:30 A.M., the gauge in the lobby of the courthouse building registered it at just over fifteen miles an hour. By 6:45, it had risen to twenty-four miles an hour.

At 6:46 A.M., Mike Hanlon awoke in his room at the Derry Home Hospital. His return to consciousness was a kind of slow dissolve - for a long time he thought he was dreaming. If so, it was an odd sort of dream - an anxiety dream, his old psych prof Doc Abelson might have called it. There seemed to be no overt reason for the anxiety, but it was there all the same; the plain white room seemed to shriek menace.

He gradually realized that he was awake. The plain white room was a hospital room. Bottles hung over his head, one full of clear liquid, the other a deep dark red one. Whole blood. He saw a blank TV set bolted to the wall and became aware of the steady sound of rain beating against the window.

Mike tried to move his legs. One moved freely but the other, his right leg, wouldn't move at all. The feeling in that leg was very faint, and he realized it was tightly bandaged.

Little by little it came back. He had settled down to write in his notebook and Henry Bowers had turned up. A real blast from the past, a golden gasser. There had been a fight, and -

Henry! Where had Henry gone? After the others?

Mike groped for the call-bell. It was draped over the head of the bed, and he had it in his hands when the door opened. A nurse stood there. Two buttons of his white tunic were unbuttoned and his dark hair was mussed, giving him a rumpled Ben Casey look. He wore a Saint Christopher medal around his neck. Even in his soupy, only-three-quarters-awake state, Mike placed him immediately. In 1958, a sixteen-year-old girl named Cheryl Lamonica had been killed in Derry, killed by It. The girl had had a fourteen-year-old brother named Mark, and this was him.

'Mark?' he said weakly. 'I have to talk to you.'

'Shhh,' Mark said. His hand was in his pocket. 'No talk.'

He walked into the room, and as he stood at the foot of the bed, Mike saw with a hopeless chill how blank Mark Lamonica's eyes were. His head was slightly cocked, as if hearing distant music. He took his hand out of his pocket.

There was a syringe in it.

'This will put you to sleep,' Mark said, and began to walk toward the bed.

11

Under the City / 6:49 A.M.

'Shhhhh!' Bill cried suddenly, although there had been no sound except their own faint footsteps.

Richie struck a light. The walls of the tunnel had moved away, and the five of them seemed very small in this space under the city. They huddled together and Beverly felt a dreamy sense of déjà vu as she observed the gigantic flagstones on the floor and the hanging nets of cobweb. They were close now. Close.

'What do you hear?' she asked Bill, trying to look everywhere as the match in Richie's hand burned down, expecting to see some new surprise come lurching or flying out of the darkness. Rodan, anyone? The alien from that gruesome movie with Sigourney Weaver? A great scuttering rat with orange eyes and silver teeth? But there was nothing - only the dusty smell of the dark, and, far away, the thunder of running water, as if the drains were filling up.

'S-S-Something ruh-ruh-wrong,' Bill said. 'Mike - '

'Mike?' Eddie asked. 'What about Mike?'

'I felt it, too,' Ben said. 'Is it . . . Bill, did he die?'

'No,' Bill said. His eyes were hazy and distant, unemotional - all of his alarm was in his tone and the defensive posture of his body. 'He . . . H-H-He . . . ' He swallowed. There was a click in his throat. His eyes widened 'Oh Oh no - !'

'Bill?' Beverly cried, alarmed. 'Bill, what is it? What - '

'Gruh-gruh-grab my hub-hands!' Bill screamed. 'Kwuh-kwuh-quick!'

Richie dropped the match and seized one of Bill's hands. Beverly grabbed the other. She groped with her free hand, and Eddie grasped it feebly with the hand at the end of his broken arm. Ben grasped his other hand and completed the circle by holding Richie's hand.

'Send him our power!' Bill cried in that same strange, deep voice. 'Send him our power, whatever You are, send him our power! Now! Now! Now!'

Beverly felt something go out from them and toward Mike. Her head rolled on her shoulders in a kind of ecstasy, and the harsh whistle of Eddie's breathing merged with the headlong thunder of water in the drains.

12

'Now,' Mark Lamonica said in a low voice. He sighed - the sigh of a man who feels orgasm approaching.

Mike pushed the call-button in his hands again and again. He could hear it ringing at the nurses' station down the hall, but no one came. With a kind of hellish second sight he understood that the nurses were sitting around down there, reading the morning paper, drinking coffee, hearing his call-bell but not hearing it, hearing but not responding, they would respond only later when it was all over, because that was how things worked in Derry. In Derry some things were better not seen or heard . . . until they were over.

Mike let the call-button fall from his hands.

Mark bent toward him, the tip of the syringe glittering. His Saint Christopher medal swung hypnotically back and forth as he drew the sheet down.

'Right there,' he whispered. The sternum.' And sighed again.

Mike suddenly felt power wash into him - some primitive power that crammed his body like volts. He stiffened, fingers splaying out as if in a convulsion. His eyes widened. A grunt jerked out of him, and that sense of dreadful paralysis was driven from him as if by a roundhouse slap.

His right hand pistoned out toward the nighttable. There was a plastic pitcher there and a heavy cafeteria-style water-glass beside it. His hand closed around the glass. Lamonica sensed the change; that dreamy, pleased light disappeared from his eyes and was replaced by wary confusion. He drew back a bit, and then Mike brought the glass up and smashed it into his face.

Lamonica screamed and staggered backward, dropping the syringe. His hands went to his spouting face; blood ran down his wrists and splashed on his white tunic.

The power left as suddenly as it had come. Mike looked dully at the shards of broken glass on the bed and his hospital johnny and his own bleeding hand. He heard the quick, light sound of crepe-soled shoes in the hall, approaching.

Now they come, he thought, Oh yes, now. And after they're gone, who'll show

up? Who'll show up next?

As they burst into his room, the nurses who had sat calmly on station as his call-bell rang frantically, Mike closed his eyes and prayed for it to be over. He prayed his friends were somewhere under the city, he prayed they were all right, he prayed they would end it.

He didn't know exactly Who he prayed to . . . but he prayed nonetheless.

13

Under the City / 6:54 A.M.

'He's a-a-all ruh-right,' Bill said presently.

Ben didn't know how long they had stood in the darkness, holding hands. It seemed to him that he had felt something - something from them, from their circle - go out and then come back. But he did not know where that thing - if it existed at all - had gone, or done.

'Are you sure, Big Bill?' Richie asked.

'Y-Y-Yes.' Bill released Richie's hand and Beverly's. 'But we h-have to finish this as kwuh-quick as we c-can. C-Come oh-oh-on.'

They went on, Richie or Bill periodically lighting matches. We don't have so much as a pea-shooter among us, Ben thought. But that's part of it, too, isn't it? Chüd. What does that mean? What was It, exactly? What was Its final face? And even if we didn't kill It, we hurt It. How did we do that?

The chamber they walked through - it could no longer be called a tunnel - grew larger and larger. Their footfalls echoed. Ben remembered the smell, that thick zoo smell. He became aware that the matches were no longer necessary - there was light now, light of a sort: a ghastly effulgence that was growing steadily stronger. In that marshy light, his friends all looked like walking corpses.

'Wall up ahead, Bill,' Eddie said.

'I nuh-nuh-know.'

Ben felt his heart begin to pick up speed. There was a sour taste in his mouth and his head had begun to ache. He felt slow and frightened. He felt fat.

'The door,' Beverly whispered.

Yes, here it was. Once, twenty-seven years before, they had been able to pass through that door by doing no more than ducking their heads. Now they would have to duck-walk their way through, or crawl on hands and knees. They had grown; here was final proof, if final proof were needed.

The pulse-points in Ben's neck and wrists felt hot and bloody; his heart had picked up a light and rapid flutter that was close to arrhythmia. Pigeon-pulse, he thought randomly, and licked his lips.

Bright greenish-yellow light flooded out from under the door; it shot through the ornate keyhole in a twisting shaft that looked almost thick enough to cut.

The mark was on the door, and again they all saw something different in that strange device. Beverly saw Tom's face. Bill saw Audra's severed head with blank eyes that stared at him in dreadful accusation. Eddie saw a grinning skull poised over two crossed bones, the symbol for poison. Richie saw the bearded face of a degenerate Paul Bunyan, eyes narrowed to killer's slits. And Ben saw Henry Bowers.

'Bill, are we strong enough?' he asked. 'Can we do this?'

'I duh-hon't nuh-nuh-know,' Bill said.

'What if it's locked?' Beverly asked in a small voice. Tom's face mocked her.

'Ih-It's not,' Bill said. 'Pluh-haces like this are n-never luh-luh-locked.' He placed the tented fingers of his right hand on the door - he had to bend over to do it - and pushed. It swung open on a flood of sick yellow-green light. That zoo smell wafted out at them, the smell of the past become the present, horribly alive, obscenely vital.

Roll, wheel, Bill thought randomly, and looked around at them. Then he dropped to his hands and knees. Beverly followed, then Richie, then Eddie. Ben came last, his flesh crawling at the feel of the ancient grit on the floor. He passed through the portal, and as he straightened up in the weird glow of fire crawling up and down the dripping stone walls in snakes of light, the last memory socked home with the force of a psychic battering ram.

He cried out, staggering back, one hand going to his head, and his first incoherent thought was No wonder Stan committed suicide! Oh God, I wish I had! He saw the same expressions of stunned horror and dawning realization on the faces of the others as the last key turned in the last lock.

Then Beverly was shrieking, clinging to Bill, as It raced down the gossamer curtain of Its webbing, a nightmare Spider from beyond time and space, a Spider from beyond the fevered imaginings of whatever inmates may live in the deepest depths of hell.

No, Bill thought coldly, not a Spider either, not really, but this shape isn't one It picked out of our minds; it's just the closest our minds can come to

(the deadlights)

whatever It really is.

It was perhaps fifteen feet high and as black as a moonless night. Each of Its legs was as thick as a muscle-builder's thigh. Its eyes were bright malevolent rubies, bulging from sockets filled with some dripping chromium-colored fluid. Its jagged mandibles opened and closed, opened and closed, dripping ribbons of foam. Frozen in an ecstasy of horror, tottering on the brink of utter lunacy, Ben observed with an eye-of-the-storm calm that this foam was alive; it struck the stinking stone-flagged floor and then began to writhe away into the cracks like protozoa.

But It's something else, there's some final shape, one that I can almost see the way you might see the shape of a man moving behind a movie screen while the show is on, some other shape, but I don't want to see It, please God, don't let me see It . . .

And it didn't matter, did it? They were seeing what they were seeing, and Ben understood somehow that It was imprisoned in this final shape, the shape of the Spider, by their common unsought and unfathered vision. It was against this It that they would live or die.

The creature was squealing and mewling, and Ben became quite sure he was hearing sounds It made twice - in his head, and then, a split second later, in his ears. Telepathic, he thought, I'm reading Its mind. Its shadow was a squat egg that raced along the ancient wall of this keep that was Its lair. Its body was covered by coarse hair, and Ben saw that It was possessed of a stinger long enough to impale a man. A clear fluid dripped from its tip, and Ben saw that this was also alive; like the saliva, the poison writhed away into the cracks of the floor. Its stinger, yes . . . but below that, Its belly bulged grotesquely, almost dragging on the floor as It moved, now changing direction slightly, heading unerringly toward their leader, toward Big Bill.

That's Its egg-sac, Ben thought, and his mind seemed to shriek at the implication. Whatever It is beyond what we see, this representation is at least symbolically correct: It's female, and It's pregnant . . . It was pregnant then and none of us knew except Stan, oh Jesus Christ YES, it was Stan, Stan, not Mike, Stan who understood, Stan who told us . . . That's why we had to come back, no matter what, because It is female, It's pregnant with some unimaginable spawn . . . and Its time has drawn close.

Incredibly, Bill Denbrough was stepping forward to meet It.

'Bill, no!' Beverly screamed.

'Stuh-Stuh-Stay b-b-back!' Bill shouted without looking around. And then Richie was running toward him, shouting his name, and Ben found his own legs in motion. He seemed to feel a phantom stomach swaying in front of him, and he welcomed the sensation. Got to become a child again, he thought incoherently. That's the only way I can keep It from driving me crazy. Got to become a kid again . . . got to accept it. Somehow.

Running. Shouting Bill's name. Vaguely aware that Eddie was running beside him, his broken arm flopping, the belt of the bath-robe Bill had cinched around it now trailing on the floor. Eddie had drawn his aspirator. He looked like a crazed malnourished gunslinger with some weird pistol.

Ben heard Bill bellow: 'You k-k-killed my brother, you fuh-fuh-fucking BITCH!'

Then It was rearing up over Bill, burying Bill in Its shadow, Its legs pawing the air. Ben heard Its eager mewling, looked into Its timeless, evil red eyes . . . and for an instant did see the shape behind the shape: saw lights, saw an endless crawling hairy thing which was made of light and nothing else, orange light, dead light that mocked life.

The ritual began for the second time.

C H A P T E R 2 2

The Ritual of Chüd

1

In the Lair of It / 1958

It was Bill who held them together as that great black Spider raced down Its web, creating a noxious breeze that tousled their hair. Stan shrieked like a baby, his brown eyes bulging from their sockets, his fingers harrowing his cheeks. Ben backed slowly away until his ample ass struck the wall to the left of the door. He felt cold fire burn through his pants and stepped away again, but dreamily. Surely none of this could be happening; it was simply the world's worst nightmare. He found he could not lift his hands. They seemed to have big weights tied to them.

Richie found his eyes drawn to that web. Hanging here and there, partially wrapped in silken strands that seemed to move as if alive, were a number of rotted half-eaten bodies. He thought he recognized Eddie Corcoran near the ceiling, although both of Eddie's legs and one of his arms were gone.

Beverly and Mike clung to each other like Hansel and Gretel in the woods, watching, paralyzed, as the Spider reached the floor and scrabbled toward them, Its distorted shadow racing along beside It on the wall.

Bill looked around at them, a tall, skinny boy in a mud-and-sewage-splattered tee-shirt that had once been white, jeans with cuffs, mud-caked Keds. His hair lay across his forehead, and his eyes were blazing. He surveyed them, seemed to dismiss them, and turned back toward the Spider. And, incredibly, he began to cross the room toward It, not running but walking fast, his elbows cocked, his forearms corded, his hands fisted.

'Yuh-Yuh-You k-k-killed my bruh-hother!'

'No, Bill!' Beverly shrieked, struggling free of Mike's embrace and running toward Bill, her red hair flying out behind her. 'Leave him alone!' she screamed at the Spider. 'Don't you touch him!'

Shit! Beverly! Ben thought, and then he was running too, stomach swaying back and forth in front of him, legs pumping. He was vaguely aware that Eddie Kaspbrak was running on his left, holding his aspirator in his good hand like a pistol.

And then It was rearing up over Bill, who was unarmed; It buried Bill in Its shadow, Its legs pawing at the air. Ben grabbed for Beverly's shoulder. His hand slapped it, then slipped off. She turned toward him, her eyes wild, her lips drawn back from her teeth.

'Help him!' she screamed.

'How?' Ben screamed back. He wheeled toward the Spider, heard Its eager mewling, looked into Its timeless, evil eyes, and saw something behind the shape; something much worse than a spider. Something that was all insane light. His courage faltered . . . but it was Bev who had asked him. Bev, and he loved her.

'Goddam you, leave Bill alone!' he shrieked.

A moment later a hand swatted his back so hard he almost fell over. It was Richie, and although tears were running down his cheeks, Richie was grinning madly. The corners of his mouth seemed to reach almost to the lobes of his ears. Spit leaked out between his teeth. 'Let's get her, Haystack!' Richie screamed. 'Chüd! Chüd!'

Her? Ben thought stupidly. Her, did he say?

Aloud: 'Okay, but what is it? What's Chüd?'

'Frocked if I know!' Richie yelled, then ran toward Bill and into the shadow of It.

It had somehow squatted on Its rear legs. Its front legs pawed the air just over Bill's head. And Stan Uris, forced to approach, compelled to approach in spite of every instinct in his mind and body, saw that Bill was staring up at It, his blue eyes fixed on Its inhuman orange ones, eyes from which that awful corpse-light spilled. Stan stopped, understanding that the Ritual of Chüd - whatever that was - had begun.

2

Bill in the Void / Early

- who are you and why do you come to Me?

I'm Bill Denbrough. You know who I am and why I'm here. You killed my brother and I'm here to kill You. You picked the wrong kid, bitch.

- I am eternal. I am the Eater of Worlds.

Yeah? That so? Well, you've had your last meal, sister.

- you have no power; here is the power; feel the power, brat, and then speak again of how you come to kill the Eternal. You think you see Me? You see only what your mind will allow. Would you see Me? Come, then! Come, brat! Come!

Thrown -

(he).

No, not thrown, fired, fired like a living bullet, like the Human Cannonball at the Shrine Circus that came to Derry each May. He was picked up and heaved across the Spider's chamber. It's only in my mind! he screamed at himself. My body's still standing right there, eye to eye with It, be brave, it's only a mind-trick, be brave, be true, stand, stand -

(thrusts)

Roaring forward, slamming into a black and dripping tunnel lined with decaying, crumbling tiles that were fifty years old, a hundred, a thousand, a million-billion, who knew, rushing in deadly silence past intersections, some lit by that twisting green-yellow fire, some by glowing balloons full of a ghastly white skull-light, others dead black; he was thrown at a speed of a thousand miles an hour past piles of bones, some human, some not, speeding like a rocket-powered dart in a wind-tunnel, now angling upward, but not toward light but toward dark, some titanic dark

(his fists)

and exploding outward into utter blackness, the blackness was everything, the blackness was the cosmos and the universe, and the floor of the blackness was hard, hard, it was like polished ebonite and he was skidding along on his chest and belly and thighs like a weight on a shuffleboard. He was on the ballroom floor of eternity, and eternity was black.

(against the posts)

- stop that why do you say that? that won't help you, stupid boy and still insists he sees the ghosts!

- stop it.'

he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts!

- stop it! stop it! I demand, I command, that you stop it! Don't like that, do you?

And thinking: If I could only say it out loud, say it without stuttering, I could break this illusion -

- this is no illusion, you foolish little boy - this is eternity, My eternity, and you are lost in it, lost forever, never to find your way back; you are eternal now, and condemned to wander in the black . . . after you meet Me face to face, that is

But there was something else here. Bill sensed it, felt it, in a crazy way smelled it: some large presence ahead in the dark. A Shape. He felt not fear but a sense of overmastering awe; here was a power which dwarfed Its power, and Bill had only time to think incoherently: Please, please, whatever You are, remember that I am very small -

He rushed toward it and saw it was a great Turtle, its shell plated with many blazing colors. Its ancient reptilian head slowly poked out of its shell, and Bill thought he felt a vague contemptuous surprise from the thing that had cast him out here. The eyes of the Turtle were kind. Bill thought it must be the oldest thing anyone could imagine, older by far than It, which had claimed to be eternal.

What are you? -

I'm the Turtle, son. I made the universe, but please don't blame me for it; I had a bellyache.

Help me! Please help me!

- I take no stand in these matters. My brother -

- has his own place in the macroverse; energy is eternal, as even a child such as yourself must understand

He was flying past the Turtle now, and even at his tremendous skidding speed, the Turtle's plated side seemed to go on and on to his right. He thought dimly of riding in a train and passing one going in the other direction, a train that was so long it seemed eventually to stand still or even move backward. He could still hear It, yammering and buzzing, Its voice high and angry, not human, full of mad hate. But when the Turtle spoke, Its voice was blanked out utterly. The Turtle spoke in Bill's head, and Bill understood somehow that there was yet Another, and that Final Other dwelt in a void beyond this one. This Final Other was, perhaps, the creator of the Turtle, which only watched, and It, which only ate. This Other was a force beyond the universe, a power beyond all other power, the author of all there was.

Suddenly he thought he understood: It meant to thrust him through some wall at the end of the universe and into some other place

(what that old Turtle called the macroverse)

where It really lived; where It existed as a titanic, glowing core which might be no more than the smallest mote in that Other's mind; he would see It naked, a thing of unshaped destroying light, and there he would either be mercifully annihilated or live forever, insane and yet conscious inside Its homicidal endless formless hungry being.

Please help me! For the others -

- you must help yourself, son

But how? Please tell me! How? How? HOW?

He had reached the Turtle's heavily scaled back legs now; there was time enough to observe its titanic yet ancient flesh, time to be struck with the wonder of its heavy toenails - they were an odd bluish-yellow color, and he could see galaxies swimming in each one.

Please, you are good, I sense and believe that you are good, and I am begging you . . . won't you please help me?

- you already know, there is only Chüd. and your friends.

Please oh please -

son, you've got to thrust your fists against the posts and still insist you see the ghosts . . . that's all I can tell you. once you get into cosmological shit like this, you got to throw away the instruction manual

He realized the voice of the Turtle was fading. He was beyond it now, bulleting into a darkness that was deeper than deep. The Turtle's voice was being overcome, overmastered, by the gleeful, gibbering voice of the Thing that had thrust him out and into this black void - the voice of the Spider, of It.

- how do you like it out here, Little Friend? do you like it? do you love it? do you give it ninety-eight points because it has a good beat and you can dance to it? can you catch it on your tonsils and heave it left and right? did you enjoy meeting my friend the Turtle? I thought that stupid old fuck died years ago, and for all the good he could do you, he might as well have, did you think he could help you?

no no no no he thrusts no he thuh-thuh-huh-huh-rusts no

- stop babbling! the time is short; let us talk while we still can. tell me about yourself, Little Friend . . . tell me, do you love all the cold dark out here? are you enjoying your grand tour of the nothingness that lies Outside? wait until you break through, Little Friend! wait until you break through to where I am! wait for that! wait for the deadlights! you'll look and you'll go mad . . . but you'll live . . . and live . . . and live . . . inside them . . . inside Me . . .

It screamed noxious laughter, and Bill became aware that Its voice was beginning both to fade and to swell, as if he was simultaneously drawing out of Its range . . . and hurtling into it. And wasn't that just what was happening? Yes. He thought it was. Because while the voices were in perfect sync, the one he was now rushing toward was totally alien, speaking syllables no human tongue or throat could reproduce. That's the voice of the deadlights, he thought.

- the time is short; let us talk while we still can

Its human voice fading the way the Bangor radio stations faded when you were in the car and travelling south. Bright, flaring terror filled him. He would shortly be beyond sane communication with It . . . and some part of him understood that, for all Its laughter, for all Its alien glee, that was what It wanted. Not just to send him out to whatever It really was, but to break their mental communication. If that ceased, he would be utterly destroyed. To pass beyond communication was to pass beyond salvation; he understood that much from the way his parents had behaved toward him after George had died. It was the only lesson their refrigerator coldness had had to teach him.

Leaving It . . . and approaching It. But the leaving was somehow more important. If It wanted to eat little kids out here, or suck them in, or whatever It did, why hadn't It sent them all out here? Why just him?

Because It had to rid Its Spider-self of him, that was why. Somehow the Spider-It and the It which It called the deadlights were linked. Whatever lived out here in the black might be invulnerable when It was here and nowhere else . . . but It was also on earth, under Derry, in a form that was physical. However repulsive It might be, in Derry it was physical . . . and what was physical could be killed.

Bill skidded through the dark, his speed still increasing. Why do I sense so much of Its talk is nothing but a bluff, a big shuck-and jive? Why should that be? How can that be?

He understood how, maybe . . . just maybe.

There is only Chüd, the Turtle had said. And suppose this was it? Suppose they had bitten deep into each other's tongues, not physically but mentally, spiritually? And suppose that if It could throw Bill far enough into the void, far enough toward Its eternal discorporate self, the ritual would be over? It would have ripped him free, killed him, and won everything all at the same

- you're doing good, son, but very shortly it's going to be too late It's scared! Scared of me! Scared of all of us!

- skidding, he was skidding, and there was a wall up ahead, he sensed it, sensed it in the dark, the wall at the edge of the continuum, and beyond it the other shape, the deadlights -

- don't talk to me, son, and don't talk to yourself - it's tearing you loose, bite in if you care, if you dare, if you can be brave, if you can stand . . . bite in, son!

Bill bit in - not with his teeth, but with teeth in his mind.

Dropping his voice a full register, making it not his own (making it, in fact, his father's voice, although Bill would go to his grave not knowing this; some secrets are never, known, and it's probably better so), drawing in a great breath, he cried: 'HE THRUSTS HIS FISTS AGAINST THE POSTS AND STILL INSISTS HE SEES THE GHOSTS NOW LET ME GO!'

He felt It scream in his mind, a scream of frustrated petulant rage . . . but it was also a scream of fear and pain. It was not used to not having Its own way; such a thing had never happened to It, and until the most recent moments of Its existence It had not suspected such a thing could.

Bill felt It writhing at him, not pulling but pushing - trying to get him away.

'THRUSTS HIS FISTS AGAINST THE POSTS, I SAID!

'STOP IT!

'BRING ME BACK! YOU MUST! I COMMAND IT! I DEMAND IT!'

It screamed again, Its pain more intense now - perhaps partly because, while It had spent Its long, long existence inflicting pain, feeding on it, It had never experienced it as a part of Itself.

Still It tried to push him, to get rid of him, blindly and stubbornly insisting on winning, as It had always won before. It pushed . . . but Bill sensed that his outward speed had slowed, and a grotesque image came into his mind: Its tongue, covered with that living spittle, extended like a thick rubber band, cracking, bleeding. He saw himself clinging to the tip of that tongue by his teeth, ripping through it a little at a time, his face bathed in the convulsive ichor that was Its blood, drowning in Its dead stench, yet still holding on, holding on somehow, while It struggled in Its blind pain and towering rage not to let Its tongue snap back -

(Chüd, this Chüd, stand, be brave, be true, stand for your brother, your friends; believe, believe in all the things you have believed in, believe that if you tell the policeman you're lost he'll see that you get home safely, that there is a Tooth Fairy who lives in a huge enamel castle, and Santa Claus below the North Pole, making toys with his trove of elves, and that Captain Midnight could be real, yes, he could be in spite of Calvin and Cissy Clark's big brother Carlton saying that was all a lot of baby stuff, believe that your mother and father will love you again, that courage ts possible and words will come smoothly every time; no more Losers, no more cowering in a hole in the ground and calling it a clubhouse, no more crying in Georgie's room because you couldn't save him and didn't know, believe in yourself believe in the heat of that desire)

He suddenly began to laugh in the darkness, not in hysteria but in utter delighted amazement.

'OH SHIT, I BELIEVE IN ALL OF THOSE THINGS!' he shouted, and it was true: even at eleven he had observed that things turned out right a ridiculous amount of the tune. Light flared around him. He raised his arms out and above his head. He turned his face up, and suddenly he felt power rush through him.

He heard It scream again . . . and suddenly he was being drawn back the way he had come, still holding that image of his teeth planted deep in the strange meat of Its tongue, his teeth locked together like grim old death. He flew through the dark, legs trailing behind him, the tips of his mud-crusted sneaker laces flying like pennants, the wind of this empty place blowing in his ears.

He was pulled past the Turtle and saw that its head had withdrawn into its shell; its voice emerged hollow and distorted, as if even the shell it lived in were a well eternities deep:

- not bad, son, but I'd finish it now; don't let It get away, energy has a way of dissipating, you know; what can be done when you're eleven can often never be done again

The voice of the Turtle faded, faded, faded. There was only the rushing dark . . . and then the mouth of a cyclopean tunnel . . . smells of age and decay . . . cobwebs brushing at his face like rotted skeins of silk in a haunted house . . . moldering tiles blurring by . . . intersections, all dark now, the moon-balloons all gone, and It was screaming, screaming:

- let me go let me go I'll leave never come back let me GO IT HURTS IT HURTS IT HURRRRRRRRRR

'Thrusts his fists!' Bill screamed, nearly delirious now. He could see light ahead but it was fading, guttering like great candles which had at last burned low . . . and for a moment he saw himself and the others holding hands in a line, Eddie on one side of him and Richie on the other. He saw his own body, sagging, his head rolled back on his neck, staring up at the Spider, which twisted and whirled like a dervish, Its coarse, spiny legs beating at the floor, poison dripping from Its stinger.

It was screaming in Its death-agony.

So Bill honestly believed.

Then he was slamming back into his body with all the impact of a line drive slamming into a baseball glove, the force of it tearing his hands loose from Richie's and Eddie's, driving him to his knees and skidding him across the floor to the edge of the web. He reached out for one of the strands without thinking, and his hand immediately went numb, as if it had been injected with a hypo full of novocaine. The strand itself was as thick as a telephone-pole guy-wire.

'Don't touch that, Bill!' Ben yelled, and Bill yanked his hand away in one quick jerk, leaving a raw place across his palm just below the fingers. It filled with blood and he staggered to his feet, eyes on the Spider.

It was scrabbling away from them, making Its way into the growing dimness at the back of the chamber as the light failed. It left puddles and pools of black blood behind as It went; somehow their confrontation had ruptured Its insides in a dozen, maybe a hundred places.

'Bill, the web!' Mike screamed. 'Look out!'

He stepped backward, craning his neck up, as strands of Its web came floating down, striking the stone-flagged floor on either side of him like the bodies of meaty white snakes. They immediately began to lose shape, to flow into the cracks between the stones. The web was falling apart, coming loose from its many moorings. One of the bodies, wrapped up like a fly, came plunging down to strike the floor with a sickening rotted-gourd sound.

'The Spider!' Bill yelled. 'Where is It?'

He could still hear It in his head, mewling and crying out in Its pain, and understood dimly that It had gone into the same tunnel It had thrown Bill into . . . but had It gone in there to flee back to the place where It had meant to send Bill . . . or to hide until they were gone? To die? Or escape?

'Christ, the lights!' Richie shouted. 'The lights're going out! What happened, Bill? Where did you go? We thought you were dead!'

In some confused part of his mind Bill knew that wasn't true: if they had really thought him dead, they would have run, scattered, and It would have picked them off easily, one by one. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that they had thought him dead, but believed him alive.

We have to make sure! If It's dying or gone back to where It came from, where the rest of It is, that's fine. But what if Ifs just hurt? What if It can get better? What -

Stan's shriek cut across his thoughts like broken glass. In the fading light Bill saw that one of the strands of webbing had come down on Stan's shoulder. Before Bill could reach him, Alike had thrown himself at the smaller boy in a flying tackle. He drove Stan away and the piece of webbing snapped back, taking a piece of Stan's polo shirt with it.

'Get back!' Ben yelled at them. 'Get away from it, it's all coming down!' He seized Beverly's hand and pulled her back toward the child-sized door while Stan struggled to his feet, looked dazedly around, and then grabbed Eddie. The two of them started toward Ben and Beverly, helping each other, looking like phantoms in the fading light.

Overhead, the spiderweb was drooping, collapsing on itself, losing its fearful symmetry. Bodies twirled lazily in the air like nightmarish plumb-bobs. Cross-strands fell in like the rotted rungs of some strange complex of ladders. Severed strands hit the stone flagging, hissed like cats, lost their shape, began to run.

Mike Hanlon wove his way through them as he would later weave his way through the opposing lines of nearly a dozen high-school football teams, head down, ducking and dodging. Richie joined him. Incredibly, Richie was laughing, although his hair was standing straight up on his head like the quills of a porcupine. The light grew dimmer, the phosphorescence that had coiled on the walls now dying away.

'Bill!' Mike shouted. 'Come on! Get the frock out of there!'

'What if It's not dead?' Bill screamed back. 'We got to go after It, Mike! We got to make sure!'

A snarl of webbing sagged outward like a parachute and then fell with a nasty ripping sound that was like skin being pulled apart. Mike grabbed Bill's arm and pulled him, stumbling, out of the way.

'It's dead!' Eddie cried, joining them. His eyes were febrile lamps, his breathing a chilly winter-whistle in his throat. Fallen strands of webbing had sizzled complex scars into the plaster of Paris of his cast. 'I heard It, It was dying, you don't sound like that if you're on your way to a sock hop, It was dying, I'm sure of it!'

Richie's hands groped out of the darkness, seized Bill, and pulled him into a rough embrace. He began to pound Bill's back ecstatically. 'I heard It, too - It was dying, Big Bill! It was dying . . . and you're not stuttering! Not at all! Howdja do it? How in the hell - ?'

Bill's brain was whirling. Exhaustion tugged at him with thick and clumsy hands. He could not remember ever feeling this tired . . . but in his mind he heard the drawling, almost weary voice of the Turtle: I'd finish it now; don't let It get away . . . what can be done when you're eleven can often never be done again.

'But we have to be sure - '

The shadows were joining hands and now the darkness was almost complete. But before the light failed utterly, he thought he saw the same hellish doubt on Beverly's face . . . and in Stan's eyes. And still, as the last of the light gave way, they could hear the tenebrous whisper-shudder-thump of Its unspeakable web falling to pieces.

3

Bill in the Void / Late

- well here you are again, Little Buddy! but what's happened to your hair? you're just as bald as a cueball! sad! what sad, short lives humans live! each life a short pamphlet written by an idiot! tut-tut, and all that

I'm still Bill Denbrough. You killed my brother and you killed Stan the Man you tried to kill Mike. And I'm going to tell you something: this time I'm not going to stop until the job's done

- the Turtle was stupid, too stupid to lie. he told you the truth, Little Buddy . . . the time only comes around once, you hurt me . . . you surprised me. never again. I am the one who called you back. I.

You called, all right, but You weren't the only one

- your friend the Turtle . . . he died a few years ago. the old idiot puked inside his shell and choked to death on a galaxy or two. very sad, don't you think? but also quite bizarre, deserves a place in Ripley's Believe It or Not, that's what I think, happened right around the same time you had that writer's block, you must have felt him go, Little Buddy

I don't believe that, either

- oh you'll believe . . . you'll see. this time, Little Buddy, I intend you to see everything, including the deadlights

He sensed Its voice rising, buzzing and racketing - at last he sensed the full extent of Its fury, and he was terrified. He reached for the tongue of Its mind, concentrating, trying desperately to recapture the full extent of that childish belief, understanding at the same time that there was a deadly truth in what It had said: last time It had been unprepared. This time . . . well, even if It had not been the only one to call them, It sure had been waiting.

But still -

He felt his own fury, clean and singing, as his eyes fixed on Its eyes. He sensed Its old scars, sensed that It had truly been hurt, and that It was still hurt.

And as It threw him, as he felt his mind swatted out of his body, he concentrated all of his being on seizing Its tongue . . . and missed his grip.

4

Richie

The other four watched, paralyzed. It was an exact replay of what had happened before - at first. The Spider, which seemed about to seize Bill and gobble him up, grew suddenly still. Bill's eyes locked with Its ruby ones. There was a sense of contact . . . a contact just beyond their ability to divine. But they felt the struggle, the clash of wills.

Then Richie glanced up into the new web, and saw the first difference.

There were bodies there, some half-eaten and half-rotted, and that was the same . . . but high up, in one corner, was another body, and Richie was sure this one was still fresh, possibly even still alive. Beverly had not looked up - her eyes were fixed on Bill and the Spider - but even in his terror, Richie saw the resemblance between Beverly and the woman in the web. Her hair was long and red. Her eyes were open but glassy and unmoving. A line of spittle had run from the left corner of her mouth down to her chin. She had been attached to one of the web's main cables by a gossamer harness that went around her waist and under both arms so that she lolled forward in a half-bow, arms and legs dangling limply. Her feet were bare.

Richie saw another body crumpled at the foot of her web, a man he had never seen before . . . and yet his mind registered an almost subconscious resemblance to the late unlamented Henry Bowers. Blood had run from both of the stranger's eyes and caked in a foam around his mouth and on his chin He -

Then Beverly was screaming. 'Something's wrong! Something's gone wrong, do something, for Christ's sake won't somebody DO something -

Richie's gaze snapped back to Bill and the Spider . . . and he sensed / heard monstrous laughter. Bill's face was stretching in some subtle way. His skin had gone parchment-sallow, as shiny as the skin of a very old person. His eyes were rolled up to the whites.

Oh Bill, where are you?

As Richie watched, blood suddenly burst from Bill's nose in a foam. His mouth was writhing, trying to scream . . . and now the Spider was advancing on him again. It was turning, presenting Its stinger.

It means to kill him . . . kill his body, anyway . . . while his mind is somewhere else. It means to shut him out forever. It's winning . . . Bill, where are you? For Christ's sake, where are you?

And somewhere, faintly, from some unimaginable distance, he heard Bill scream . . . and the words, although meaningless, were crystal-clear and full of sickening

(the Turtle is dead oh God the Turtle really is dead)

despair.

Bev shrieked again and put her hands to her ears as if to shut out that fading voice. The Spider's stinger rose and Richie bolted at It, a grin spreading up toward his ears, and he called out in his best Irish Cop's Voice:

'Here, here, me foine girl! Just what in the hell do ye think ye're doin? Belay that guff before I snatch yer pettiskirts and snap yer smithyriddles!'

The Spider stopped laughing, and Richie felt a rising howl of anger and pain inside Its head. Hurt It! he thought triumphantly. Hurt It, how about that, hurt It, and guess what? I'VE GOT ITS TONGUE! I THINK BILL MISSED IT SOMEHOW BUT WHILE IT WAS DISTRACTED I GOT -

Then, screaming at him, Its cries a hive of furious bees in his head, Richie was whacked out of himself and into darkness, dimly aware that It was trying to shake him loose. It was doing a pretty good job, too. Terror washed through him, and then was replaced by a sense of cosmic absurdity. He remembered Beverly with his Duncan yo-yo, showing him how to make it sleep, walk the dog, go around the world. And now here he was, Richie the Human Yo-Yo, and Its tongue was the string. Here he was, and this wasn't called walking the dog but maybe walking the Spider, and if that wasn't funny, what was?

Richie laughed. It wasn't polite to laugh with your mouth full, of course, but he doubted if anybody out here read Miss Manners.

That got him laughing again, and he bit in harder.

The Spider screamed and shook him furiously, howling Its anger at being surprised again - It had believed only the writer would challenge It, and now this man who was laughing like a crazy boy had seized It when It was least prepared.

Richie felt himself slipping.

- hold eet a secon, senhorrita, we ees gain out here together or I ain gonna sell you no tickets in la lotería after all, and every one is a big winner, I swear on my mamma's name

He felt his teeth catch again, more firmly this time. And there was a fainting sort of pain as It drove Its fangs into his own tongue. Boy, it was still pretty funny, though. Even in the dark, being hurled after Bill with only the tongue of this unspeakable monster left to connect him to his own world, even with the pain of Its poisonous fangs suffusing his mind like a red fog, it was pretty goddamned funny. Check it out, folks. You'll believe a disc jockey can fly.

He was flying, all right.

Richie was in greater darkness than he had ever known, than he had ever suspected might exist, travelling at what felt like the speed of light, and being shaken as a terrier shakes a rat. He sensed that there was something up ahead, some titanic corpse. The Turtle he had heard Bill lamenting in his fading voice? Must be. It was only a shell, a dead husk. Then he was past, rushing on into the darkness.

Really steaming now, he thought, and felt that wild urge to cackle again.

bill! bill, can you hear me?

- he's gone, he's in the deadlights, let me go! LET ME GO!

(richie?)

Incredibly distant; incredibly far out in the black.

bill! bill! here I am! catch hold! for God's sake catch hold

- he's dead, you're all dead, you're too old, don't you understand that? now let

me GO!

hey bitch, you're never too old to rock and roll

- LET ME GO!

take me to him and maybe I will

Richie

- closer, he was closer now, thank God -

here I come, Big Bill! Richie to the rescue! Gonna save your old cracked ass! Owe you one from that day on Neibolt Street, remember?

- let me GOOOO!

It was hurting badly now, and Richie understood how completely he had caught It by surprise - It had believed It had only Bill to deal with. Well, good. Good 'miff. Richie didn't care about killing It right now; he was no longer sure It could be killed. But Bill could be killed, and Richie sensed that Bill's time was now very, very short. Bill was closing in on some large nasty surprise out here, something best not thought about.

Richie, no! Go back! It's the edge of everything up here! The deadlights!

souns like what you turn on when you drivinn you hearse at midnie, senhorr . . . and where is you, honey chile? smile, so I can see where you is!

And suddenly Bill was there, skidding along on

(the left? right? there was no direction here)

one side or the other. And beyond him, coming up fast, Richie could see/sense something that finally dried up his laughter. It was a barrier, something of a strange, non-geometrical shape that his mind could not grasp. Instead his mind translated it as best it could, as it had translated the shape of It into a Spider, allowing Richie to think of it as a colossal gray wall made of fossilized wooden stakes. These stakes went forever up and forever down, like the bars of a cage. And from between them shone a great blind light. It glared and moved, smiled and snarled. The light was alive.

(deadlights)

More than alive: it was full of a force - magnetism, gravity, perhaps something else. Richie felt himself lifted and dropped, swirled and pulled, as if he were shooting a fast throat of rapids in an innertube. He could feel the light moving eagerly over his face . . . and the light was thinking.

This is It, this is It, the rest of It.

- let me go, you promised to let me GO

I know but sometimes, honeychile, I lie - my mamma she beat me fo it but my daddy, he done just about give up

He sensed Bill tumbling and flailing toward one of the gaps in the wall, sensed evil fingers of light reaching for him, and with a final despairing effort, he reached for his friend.

Bill! Your hand! Give me your hand! YOUR HAND, GODDAMMIT' YOUR HAND!

Bill's hand shot out, the fingers opening and closing, that living fire crawling and twisting over Audra's wedding ring in runic, Moorish patterns - wheels, crescents, stars, swastikas, linked circles that grew into rolling chains. Bill's face was overlaid with the same light, making him look tattooed. Richie stretched out as far as he could, hearing It scream and yammer.

(I missed him, oh dear God I missed he's going to shoot through)

Then Bill's fingers closed over Richie's, and Richie clenched his hand into a fist. Bill's legs flew through one of the gaps in the frozen wood, and for one mad moment Richie realized he could see all the bones and veins and capillaries inside them, as if Bill had shot halfway into the maw of the world's strongest X-ray machine. Richie felt the muscles in his arm stretch like taffy, felt the ball-and-socket joint in his shoulder creak and groan in protest as the footpounds of pressure built up.

He summoned all of his force and shouted: 'Pull us back! Pull us back or I'll kill you! I . . . I'll Voice you to death!'

The Spider screeched again, and Richie suddenly felt a great, snapping whiplash curl through his body. His arm was a white-hot bar of agony. His grip on Bill's hand began to slip.

'Hold on, Big Bill!'

'I got you! Richie, I got you!'

You better, Richie thought grimly, because I think you could walk ten billion miles out here and never find a fucking pay toilet.

They whistled back, that crazy light fading, becoming a series of brilliant pinpoints that finally winked out. They drove through the darkness like torpedoes, Richie gripping Its tongue with his teeth and Bill's wrist with one aching hand. There was the Turtle; there and gone in a single eyeblink.

Richie sensed them drawing closer to whatever passed for the real world (although he believed he would never think of it as exactly 'real' again; he would see it as a clever canvas scene underlaid with a crisscrossing of support-cables . . . cables like the strands of a spiderweb). But we're going to be all right, he thought. We're going to get back. We -

The buffeting began then - the whipping, slamming, side-to-side flailing as It tried one final time to shake them off and leave them Outside. And Richie felt his grip slipping. He heard Its guttural roar of triumph and concentrated his being on holding . . . but he continued to slip. He bit down frantically, but Its tongue seemed to be losing substance and reality; it seemed to be becoming gossamer.

'Help!' Richie screamed. 'I'm losing it! Help! Somebody help us!'

5

Eddie

Eddie was half-aware of what was happening; he felt it somehow, saw it somehow, but as if through a gauzy curtain. Somewhere, Bill and Richie were struggling to come back. Their bodies were here, but the rest of them - the real of them - was far away.

He had seen the Spider turn to impale Bill with Its stinger, and then Richie had run forward, yelling at It in that ridiculous Irish Cop's Voice he used to use . . . only Richie must have improved his act a hell of a lot over the years, because this Voice sounded eerily like Mr Nell from the old days.

The Spider had turned toward Richie, and Eddie had seen Its unspeakable red eyes bulge in their sockets. Richie yelled again, this time in his Pancho Vanilla Voice, and Eddie had felt the Spider scream in pain. Ben yelled hoarsely as a split appeared in Its hide along the line of one of Its scars from the last time. A stream of ichor, black as crude oil, sprayed out. Richie had started to say something else . . . and his voice had begun to diminish, like the fade at the end of a pop song. His head had rolled back on his neck, his eyes fixed on Its eyes. The Spider grew quiet again.

Time passed - Eddie had no idea just how much. Richie and the Spider stared at each other; Eddie sensed the connection between them, felt a swirl of talk and emotion somewhere far away. He could make out nothing exactly, but sensed the tones of things in colors and hues.

Bill lay slumped on the floor, nose and ears bleeding, fingers twitching slightly, his long face pale, his eyes closed.

The Spider was now bleeding in four or five places, badly hurt again, badly hurt but still dangerously vital, and Eddie thought: Why are we just standing around here? We could hurt It while It's occupied with Richie! Why doesn't somebody move, for Christ's sake?

He sensed a wild triumph - and that feeling was dearer, sharper. Closer. They're coming back! he wanted to shout, but his mouth was too dry, his throat too tight. They're coming back!

Then Richie's head began to turn slowly from side to side. His body seemed to ripple inside his clothes. His glasses hung on the end of his nose for a moment . . . then fell off and shattered on the stone floor.

The Spider stirred, its spiny legs making a dry clittering on the floor. Eddie heard It cry out in terrible triumph, and a moment later, Richie's voice burst clearly into his head:

(help! I'm losing it! somebody help me!}

Eddie ran forward then, yanking his aspirator from his pocket with his good hand, his lips drawn back in a grimace, his breath whistling painfully in and out of a throat that now felt the size of a pinhole. Crazily, his mother's face danced before him and she was crying: Don't go near that Thing, Eddie! Don't go near It! Things like that give you cancer!

'Shut up, Ma!' Eddie screamed in a high, shrieky voice - all the voice he had left. The Spider's head turned toward the sound, Its eyes momentarily leaving Richie's.

'Here!' Eddie howled in his fading voice. 'Here, have some of this!'

He leaped at It, triggering the aspirator at the same time, and for an instant all his childhood belief in the medicine came back to him, the childhood medicine that could solve everything, that could make him feel better when the bigger boys roughed him up or when he was knocked over in the rush to get through the doors when school let out or when he had to sit on the edge of the Tracker Brothers' vacant lot, out of the game because his mother wouldn't allow him to play baseball. It was good medicine, strong medicine, and as he leaped into the Spider's face, smelling Its foul yellow stench, feeling himself overwhelmed by Its single-minded fury and determination to wipe them all out, he triggered the aspirator into one of Its ruby eyes.

He felt-heard Its scream - no rage this time, only pain, a horrid screaming agony. He saw the mist of droplets settle on that blood-red bulge, saw the droplets turn white where they landed, saw them sink in as a splash of carbolic acid would sink in; he saw Its huge eye begin to flatten out like a bloody egg-yolk and run in a ghastly stream of living blood and ichor and maggoty pus.

'Come home now, Bill!' he screamed with the last of his voice, and then he struck It, he felt Its noisome heat baking into him; he felt a terrible wet warmth and realized that his good arm had slipped into the Spider's mouth.

He triggered the aspirator again, shooting the stuff right down Its throat this tune, right down Its rotten evil stinking gullet, and there was sudden, flashing pain, as clean as the drop of a heavy knife, as Its jaws closed and ripped his arm off at the shoulder.

Eddie fell to the floor, the ragged stump of his arm spraying blood, faintly aware that Bill was getting shakily to his feet, that Richie was weaving and stumbling toward him like a drunk at the end of a long hard night.

' - eds - '

Far away. Unimportant. He could feel everything running out of him along with his life's blood . . . all the rage, all the pain, all the fear, all the confusion and hurt. He supposed he was dying but he felt . . . ah, God, he felt so lucid, so clear, like a window-pane which has been washed clean and now lets in all the gloriously frightening light of some unsuspected dawning; the light, oh God, that perfect rational light that clears the horizon somewhere in the world every second.

' - eds oh my god bill ben someone he's lost his arm, his - '

He looked up at Beverly and saw she was crying, the tears coursing down her dirty cheeks as she got an arm under him; he became aware that she had taken off her blouse and was trying to staunch the flow of blood, and that she was screaming for help. Then he looked at Richie and licked his lips. Fading, fading back. Becoming clearer and clearer, emptying out, all of the impurities flowing out of him so he could become clear, so that the light could flow through, and if he had had time enough he could have preached on this, he could have sermonized: Not bad, he would begin. This is not bad at all. But there was something else he had to say first.

'Richie,' he whispered.

'What?' Richie was down on his hands and knees, staring at him desperately.

'Don't call me Eds,' he said, and smiled. He raised his left hand slowly and touched Richie's cheek. Richie was crying. 'You know I . . . I . . . ' Eddie closed his eyes, thinking how to finish, and while he was still thinking it over he died.

6

Derry / 7:00 - 9:00 A.M.

By 7:00 A.M., the wind-speed in Derry had picked up to about thirty-seven miles an hour, with gusts up to forty-five. Harry Brooks, a National Weather Service forecaster based at Bangor International Airport, made an alarmed call to NWS headquarters in Augusta. The winds, he said, were coming out of the west and blowing in a queer semicircular pattern he had never seen before . . . but it looked to him more and more like some weird species of pocket hurricane, one that was limited almost exclusively to Derry Township. At 7:10, the major Bangor radio stations broadcast the first severe-weather warnings. The explosion of the power-transformer at Tracker Brothers' had killed the power all over Derry on the Kansas Street side of the Barrens. At 7:17, a hoary old maple on the Old Cape side of the Barrens fell with a terrific rending crash, flattening a Nite-Owl store on the corner of Merit Street and Cape Avenue. An elderly patron named Raymond Fogarty was killed by a toppling beer cooler. This was the same Raymond Fogarty who, as the minister of the First Methodist Church of Derry, had presided over the burial rites of George Denbrough in October of 1957. The maple also pulled down enough power lines to knock out the power in both the Old Cape and the somewhat more fashionable Sherburn Woods development beyond it. The clock in the steeple of the Grace Baptist Church had chimed neither six nor seven. At 7:20, three minutes after the maple fell in the Old Cape and about an hour and fifteen minutes after every toilet and domestic drain over there had suddenly reversed itself, the clock in the tower chimed thirteen times. A minute later, a blue-white stroke of lightning struck the steeple. Heather Libby, the minister's wife, happened to be looking out the window of the parsonage's kitchen at the time, and she said that the steeple 'exploded like someone loaded it up with dynamite.' Whitewashed boards, chunks of beams, and clockwork from Switzerland showered down on the street. The ragged remains of the steeple burned briefly and then guttered out in the rain, which was now a tropical downpour. The streets leading downhill into the downtown shopping area foamed and ran. The progress of the Canal under Main Street had become a steady shaking thunder that made people look at each other uneasily. At 7:25, with the titanic crash of the Grace Baptist steeple still reverberating all over Derry, the janitor who came into Wally's Spa every morning except Sunday to swamp the place out saw something which sent him screaming into the street. This fellow, who had been an alcoholic ever since his first semester at the University of Maine to these eleven years ago, was paid a pittance for his services - his real pay, it was understood, was his absolute freedom to finish up anything left in the beer kegs under the bar from the night before. Richie Tozier might or might not have remembered him; he was Vincent Caruso Taliendo, better known to his fifth-grade contemporaries as 'Boogers' Taliendo. As he was mopping up on that apocalyptic morning in Derry, working his way gradually closer and closer to the serving area, he saw all seven of the beer taps - three Bud, two Narragansett, one Schlitz (known more familiarly to the bleary patrons of Wally's as Slits), and one Miller Lite - nod forward, as if pulled by seven invisible hands. Beer ran from them in streams of gold-white foam. Vince started forward, thinking not of ghosts or phantoms but of his morning's dividend going down the drain. Then he skidded to a stop, eyes widening, and a wailing, horrified scream rose in the empty, beer-smelling cave that was Wally's Spa. Beer had given way to arterial streams of blood. It swirled in the chromium drains, overflowed, and ran down the side of the bar in little streamlets. Now hair and chunks of flesh began to splurt out of the beer-taps. 'Boogers' Taliendo watched this, transfixed, not even able to summon enough strength to scream again. Then there was a thudding, toneless blast as one of the beer kegs under the counter exploded. All of the cupboard doors under the bar swung wide. Greenish smoke, like the aftermath of a magician's trick, began to drift out of them. 'Boogers' had seen enough. Screaming, he fled into the street, which was now a shallow canal. He fell on his butt, got up, and threw a terrified glance back over his shoulder. One of the bar windows blew out with a loud shooting-gallery sound. Whickers of broken glass whistled all around Vince's head. A moment later the other window exploded. Once again he was miraculously untouched . . . but he decided on the spur of the moment that the time had come to see his sister up Eastport. He started off at once, and his journey to the Derry town limits and beyond would make a saga in itself . . . but suffice it to say that he did eventually get out of town. Others were not so lucky. Aloysius Nell, who had turned seventy-seven not long since, was sitting with his wife in the parlor of their home on Strapham Street, watching the storm pound Derry. At 7:32, he suffered a fatal stroke. His wife told her brother a week later that Aloysius dropped his coffee cup on the rug, sat bolt-upright, his eyes wide and staring, and screamed: 'Here, here, me foine girl! Just what in the hell do ye think ye're doin? Belay that guff before I snatch yer pettiskimr - ' Then he fell out of his chair, smashing his coffee cup under him. Maureen Nell, who knew well how bad his ticker had been for the last three years, understood immediately that all was over with him, and after loosening his collar she had run for the telephone to call Father McDowell. But the phone was out of order. A funny noise like a police siren was all it would make. And so, although she knew it was probably a blasphemy she would have to answer for to Saint Peter, she had attempted to give him the last rites herself. She felt confident, she told her brother, that God would understand even if Saint Peter didn't. Aloysius had been a good husband and a good man, and if he drank too much, that was only the Irish in him coming out. At 7:49 a series of explosions shook the Derry Mall, which stood on the site of the defunct Kitchener Ironworks. No one was killed; the mall didn't open until 10:00, and the five-man janitorial squad hadn't been due to arrive until 8:00 (and on such a morning as this, very few of them would have shown up anyway). A team of investigators later dismissed the idea of sabotage. They suggested - rather vaguely - that the explosions had probably been caused by water which had seeped into the mall's electrical system. Whatever the reason, no one was going to go shopping at the Derry Mall for a long time. One explosion totally wiped out Zale's Jewelry Store. Diamond rings, ID bracelets, strings of pearls, trays of wedding rings, and Seiko digital watches flew everywhere in a hail of bright, sparkly trinkets. A music-box flew the length of the east corridor and landed in the fountain outside of the J. C. Penney's, where it briefly played a bubbly rendition of the theme from Love Story before shutting down. The same blast tore a hole through the Baskin-Robbins next door, turning the thirty-one flavors into ice-cream soup that ran away along the floor in cloudy runnels. The blast which tore through Sears lifted off a chunk of the roof and the rising wind sailed it away like a kite; it came down a thousand yards away, slicing cleanly through the silo of a farmer named Brent Kilgallon. Kilgallon's sixteen-year-old son rushed out with his mother's Kodak and took a picture. The National Enquirer bought it for sixty dollars, which the boy used to buy two new tires for his Yamaha motorcycle. A third explosion ripped through Hit or Miss, sending flaming skirts, jeans, and underwear out into the flooded parking-lot. And a final explosion tore open the mall branch of the Derry Farmers' Trust like a rotted box of crackers. A chunk of the bank's roof was also torn off. Burglar alarms went off with a bray that would not be silenced until the security system's independent wiring hookup was shorted out four hours later. Loan contracts, banking instruments, deposit slips, cash-drawer chits, and Money-Manager forms were lifted into the sky and blown away by the rising wind. And money: tens and twenties mostly, with a generous helping of fives and a soupcon of fifties and hundreds. Better than $75,000 blew away, according to the bank's officers . . . Later, after a mass shakeup in the bank's executive structure (and an FSLIC bail-out), some would admit - strictly off the record, of course - that it had been more like $200,000. A woman in Haven Village named Rebecca Paulson found a fifty-dollar bill fluttering from her back-door welcome mat, two twenties in her bird-house, and a hundred plastered against an oak tree in her back yard. She and her husband used the money to make an extra two payments on their Bombardier Skidoo. Dr Hale, a retired doctor who had lived on West Broadway for nearly fifty years, was killed at 8:00 A.M. Dr Hale liked to boast that he had taken the same two-mile walk from his West Broadway home and around Derry Park and the Elementary School for the last twenty-five of those fifty years. Nothing stopped him; not rain, sleet, hail, howling nor'easters, or subzero cold. He set out on the morning of May 31st in spite of his housekeeper's worried fussings. His exit-line from the world, spoken back over his shoulder as he went through the front door, pulling his hat firmly down to his ears, was: 'Don't be so goddamned silly, Hilda. This is nothing but a capful of rain. You should have seen it in '57! That was a storm!' As Dr Hale turned back onto West Broadway, a manhole cover in front of the Mueller place suddenly lifted off like the pay load of a Redstone rocket. It decapitated the good doctor so quickly and neatly that he walked on another three steps before collapsing, dead, on the sidewalk. And the wind continued to rise.

7

Under the City / 4:15 P.M.

Eddie led them through the darkened tunnels for an hour, perhaps an hour and a half, before admitting, in a tone that was more bewildered than frightened, that for the first time in his life he was lost.

They could still hear the dim thunder of water in the drains, but the acoustics of all of these tunnels was so crazed that it was impossible to tell if the water-sounds were coming from ahead or behind, left or right, above or below. Their matches were gone. They were lost in the dark.

Bill was scared . . . plenty scared. The conversation he'd had with his father in his father's shop kept coming back to him. There's nine pounds of blueprints that just disappeared somewhere along the line . . . My point is that nobody knows where all the damned sewers and drains go, or why. When they work, nobody cares. When they don't, there's three or four sad sacks from Derry Water who have to try and find out which pump went flooey or where the plug-up is . . . It's dark and smelly and there are rats. Those are all good reasons to stay out, but the best reason is that you could get lost. It's happened before.

Happened before. Happened before. It's happened -

Sure it had. There was that bundle of bones and polished cotton they had passed on the way to Its lair, for instance.

Bill felt panic trying to rise and pushed it back. It went, but not easily. He could feel it back there, a live thing, struggling and twisting, trying to get out. Adding to it was the nagging unanswerable question of whether they had killed It or not. Richie said yes, Mike said yes, so did Eddie. But he hadn't liked the frightened doubtful look on Bev's face, or on Stan's, as the light died and they crawled back through the small door, away from the susurating collapsing web.

'So what do we do now?' Stan asked. Bill heard the frightened, little-boy tremble in Stan's voice and knew the question was aimed directly at him.

'Yeah,' Ben said. 'What? Damn, I wish we had a flashlight . . . or even a can . . . candle.' Bill thought he heard a stifled sob in the second ellipsis. It frightened him more than anything else. Ben would have been astounded to know it, but Bill thought the fat boy tough and resourceful, steadier than Richie and less apt to cave in suddenly than Stan. If Ben was getting ready to crack, they were on the edge of very bad trouble. It was not the skeleton of the Water Department guy to which Bill's own mind kept returning but to Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher, lost in McDougal's Cave. He would push the thought away and then it would come stealing back.

Something else was troubling him, but the concept was too large and too vague for his tired boy's mind to grasp. Perhaps it was the very simplicity of the idea that made it elusive: they were falling away from each other. The bond that had held them all this long summer was dissolving. It had been faced and vanquished. It might be dead, as Richie and Eddie thought, or It might be wounded so badly It would sleep for a hundred years, or a thousand, or ten thousand. They had faced It, seen It with Its final mask laid aside, and It had been horrible enough - oh, for sure! - but once seen, Its physical form was not so bad and Its most potent weapon was taken away from It. They all had, after all, seen spiders before. They were alien and somehow crawlingly dreadful, and he supposed that none of them would ever be able to see another one

(if we ever get out of this)

without feeling a shudder of revulsion. But a spider was, after all, only a spider. Perhaps at the end, when the masks of horror were laid aside, there was nothing with which the human mind could not cope. That was a heartening thought. Anything except

(the deadlights)

whatever had been out there, but perhaps even that unspeakable living light which crouched at the doorway to the macroverse was dead or dying. The deadlights, and the trip into the black to the place where they had been, was already growing hazy and hard to recall in his mind. And that wasn't really the point. The point, felt but not grasped, was simply that the fellowship was ending . . . it was ending and they were still in the dark. That Other had through their friendship, perhaps been able to make them something more than children. But they were becoming children again. Bill felt it as much as the others.

'What now, Bill?' Richie asked, finally saying it right out.

'I d-d-don't nuh-nuh-know,' Bill said. His stutter was back, alive and well. He heard it, they heard it, and he stood in the dark, smelling the sodden aroma of their growing panic, wondering how long it would be before somebody - Stan, most likely it would be Stan - tore things wide open by saying: Well, why don't you know? You got us into this!

'And what about Henry?' Mike asked uneasily. 'Is he still out there, or what?'

'Oh, Jeez,' Eddie said . . . almost moaned. 'I forgot about him. Sure he is, sure he is, he's probably as lost as we are and we could run into him any time . . . Jeez, Bill, don't you have any ideas? Your dad works down here! Don't you have any ideas at all?'

Bill listened to the distant mocking thunder of the water and tried to have the idea that Eddie - all of them - had a right to demand. Because yes, correct, he had gotten them into this and it was his responsibility to get them back out again. Nothing came. Nothing.

'I have an idea,' Beverly said quietly.

In the dark, Bill heard a sound he could not immediately place. A whispery little sound, but not scary. Then there was a more easily placed sound . . . a zipper. What - ? he thought, and then he realized what. She was undressing. For some reason, Beverly was undressing.

'What are you doing? Richie asked, and his shocked voice cracked on the last word.