It/August 1958

Something new had happened.

For the first time in forever, something new.

Before the universe there had been only two things. One was Itself and

the other was the Turtle. The Turtle was a stupid old thing that never came out of its shell. It thought that maybe the Turtle was dead, had been dead

for the last billion years or so. Even if it wasn’t, it was still a stupid old thing, and even if the Turtle had vomited the universe out whole, that didn’t change the fact of its stupidity.

It had come here long after the Turtle withdrew into its shell, here to Earth, and It had discovered a depth of imagination here that was almost new, almost of concern. This quality of imagination made the food very rich. Its teeth rent flesh gone stiff with exotic terrors and voluptuous fears: they dreamed of nightbeasts and moving muds; against their will they contemplated endless gulphs.

Upon this rich food It existed in a simple cycle of waking to eat and sleeping to dream. It had created a place in Its own image, and It looked upon this place with favor from the deadlights which were Its eyes. Derry was Its killing-pen, the people of Derry Its sheep. Things had gone on.

Then . . . these children. Something new.

For the first time in forever.

When It had burst up into the house on Neibolt Street, meaning to kill them all, vaguely uneasy that It had not been able to do so already (and

surely that unease had been the first new thing), something had happened which was totally unexpected, utterly unthought of, and there had been pain, pain, great roaring pain all through the shape it had taken, and for one moment there had also been fear, because the only thing It had in common with the stupid old Turtle and the cosmology of the macroverse outside the puny egg of this universe was just this: all living things must

abide by the laws of the shape they inhabit. For the first time It realized that perhaps Its ability to change Its shapes might work against It as well as for It. There had never been pain before, there had never been fear before, and for a moment It had thought It might die—oh Its head had been filled with a great white silver pain, and it had roared and mewled and bellowed and

somehow the children had escaped.

But now they were coming. They had entered Its domain under the city, seven foolish children blandering through the darkness without lights or weapons. It would kill them now, surely.

It had made a great self-discovery: It did not want change or surprise. It did not want new things, ever. It wanted only to eat and sleep and dream and eat again.

Following the pain and that brief bright fear, another new emotion had arisen (as all genuine emotions were new to It, although It was a great

mocker of emotions): anger. It would kill the children because they had, by some amazing accident, hurt It. But It would make them suffer first because for one brief moment they had made It fear them.

Come to me then, It thought, listening to their approach. Come to me, children, and see how we float down here . . . how we all float.

And yet there was a thought that insinuated itself no matter how strongly It tried to push the thought away. It was simply this: if all things flowed

from It (as they surely had done since the Turtle sicked up the universe and then fainted inside its shell), how could any creature of this or any other world fool It or hurt It, no matter how briefly or triflingly? How was that possible?

And so a last new thing had come to It, this not an emotion but a cold speculation: suppose It had not been alone, as It had always believed?

Suppose there was Another?

And suppose further that these children were agents of that Other? Suppose. . . suppose . . .

It began to tremble.

Hate was new. Hurt was new. Being crossed in Its purpose was new. But the most terrible new thing was this fear. Not fear of the children, that had passed, but the fear of not being alone.

No. There was no other. Surely there was not. Perhaps because they were children their imaginations had a certain raw power It had briefly

underestimated. But now that they were coming, It would let them come.

They would come and It would cast them one by one into the macroverse . .

. into the deadlights of Its eyes.

Yes.

When they got here It would cast them, shrieking and insane, into the deadlights.

2

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 drain. 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 dead-ended 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-nuhknows. My d-d-dad says some people, ih-hit’s 1-like they got a cuh-huh-hompass in their heads. Eddie’s 1-1-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 It’s 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 stink, 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 Derry’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 boh-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 don’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 get youuuuuu—”

“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 killing 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 brought 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 shirt 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’s 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’s 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 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 fingers. 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 fingers 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. ”

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. Pain 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 plunged 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 igs-zistence 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 Sumner 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 upcurving 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 I-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 great!”

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?

 

 

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, rattling 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 I-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-Ch-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 pajamas. 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 us. 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 gear-wheel 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 huh-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 bathrobe 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.