Chapter no 22 – The Ritual of Chüd

IT by Stephen King

In the Lair of It/1958

It was Bill who held them together as that great black Spider raced down Its web, creating a noxious breeze that tousled their hair. Stan shrieked like a baby, his brown eyes bulging from their sockets, his fingers harrowing his cheeks. Ben backed slowly away until his ample ass struck the wall to the left of the door. He felt cold fire burn through his pants and stepped away again, but dreamily. Surely none of this could be happening; it was simply

the world’s worst nightmare. He found he could not lift his hands. They seemed to have big weights tied to them.

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

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

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

“Yuh-Yuh-You k-k-killed my bruh-hother!”

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

Shit! Beverly! Ben thought, and then he was running too, stomach swaying back and forth in front of him, legs pumping. He was vaguely

aware that Eddie Kaspbrak was running on his left, holding his aspirator in his good hand like a pistol.

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

“Help him!” she screamed.

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

“Goddam you, leave Bill alone!” he shrieked.

A moment later a hand swatted his back so hard he almost fell over. It was Richie, and although tears were running down his cheeks, Richie was grinning madly. The corners of his mouth seemed to reach almost to the

lobes of his ears. Spit leaked out between his teeth. “Let’s get her, Haystack!” Richie screamed. “Chüd! Chüd!”

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

Aloud: “Okay, but what is it? What’s Chüd? ”

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

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

Bill in the Void/Early

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

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

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

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

—you have no power; here is the power; feel the power, brat, and then

speak again of how you come to kill the Eternal. You think you see Me? You see only what your mind will allow. Would you see Me? Come, then! Come, brat! Come!

Thrown—

(he)

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

(thrusts)

Roaring forward, slamming into a black and dripping tunnel lined with decaying, crumbling tiles that were fifty years old, a hundred, a thousand, a million-billion, who knew, rushing in deadly silence past intersections,

some lit by that twisting green-yellow fire, some by glowing balloons full of a ghastly white skull-light, others dead black; he was thrown at a speed of a thousand miles an hour past piles of bones, some human, some not, speeding like a rocket-powered dart in a wind-tunnel, now angling upward, but not toward light but toward dark, some titanic dark

(his fists)

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

shuffleboard. He was on the ballroom floor of eternity, and eternity was

black.

(against the posts)

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

—stop it!

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

—stop it! stop it! I demand, I command, that you stop it! Don’t like that, do you?

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

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

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

whatever You are, remember that I am very small—

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

What are you?

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

Help me! Please help me!

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

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

He was flying past the Turtle now, and even at his tremendous skidding speed, the Turtle’s plated side seemed to go on and on to his right. He

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

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

(what that old Turtle called the macroverse)

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

Please help me! For the others—

—you must help yourself, son

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

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

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

—you already know. there is only Chüd. and your friends. Please oh please

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

He realized the voice of the Turtle was fading. He was beyond it now, bulleting into a darkness that was deeper than deep. The Turtle’s voice was being overcome, overmastered, by the gleeful, gibbering voice of the Thing

that had thrust him out and into this black void—the voice of the Spider, of It.

—how do you like it out here, Little Friend? do you like it? do you love it? do you give it ninety-eight points because it has a good beat and you can dance to it? can you catch it on your tonsils and heave it left and right? did you enjoy meeting my friend the Turtle? I thought that stupid old fuck died

years ago, and for all the good he could do you, he might as well have, did you think he could help you? no no no no he thrusts no he thuh-thuh-huh- huh-rusts no

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

them . . . inside Me . . .

It screamed noxious laughter, and Bill became aware that Its voice was beginning both to fade and to swell, as if he was simultaneously drawing out of Its range . . . and hurtling into it. And wasn’t that just what was

happening? Yes. He thought it was. Because while the voices were in perfect sync, the one he was now rushing toward was totally alien, speaking syllables no human tongue or throat could reproduce. That’s the voice of the deadlights, he thought.

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

Its human voice fading the way the Bangor radio stations faded when you were in the car and travelling south. Bright, flaring terror filled him. He would shortly be beyond sane communication with It . . . and some part of him understood that, for all Its laughter, for all Its alien glee, that was what It wanted. Not just to send him out to whatever It really was, but to break their mental communication. If that ceased, he would be utterly destroyed.

To pass beyond communication was to pass beyond salvation; he understood that much from the way his parents had behaved toward him after George had died. It was the only lesson their refrigerator coldness had had to teach him.

Leaving It . . . and approaching It. But the leaving was somehow more important. If It wanted to eat little kids out here, or suck them in, or

whatever It did, why hadn’t It sent them all out here? Why just him?

Because It had to rid Its Spider-self of him, that was why. Somehow the Spider-It and the It which It called the deadlights were linked. Whatever lived out here in the black might be invulnerable when It was here and

nowhere else

. . . but It was also on earth, under Derry, in a form that was physical.

However repulsive It might be, in Derry it was physical . . . and what was physical could be killed.

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

He understood how, maybe . . . just maybe.

There is only Chüd, the Turtle had said. And suppose this was it?

Suppose they had bitten deep into each other’s tongues, not physically but mentally, spiritually? And suppose that if It could throw Bill far enough into the void, far enough toward Its eternal discorporate self, the ritual would be over? It would have ripped him free, killed him, and won everything all at

the same time.

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

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

the other shape, the deadlights—

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

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

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

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

moments of Its existence It had not suspected such a thing could.

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

“THRUSTS HIS FISTS AGAINST THE POSTS, I SAID! ”STOP IT!

“BRING ME BACK! YOU MUST! I COMMAND IT! I DEMAND IT!”

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

Still It tried to push him, to get rid of him, blindly and stubbornly insisting on winning, as It had always won before. It pushed . . . but Bill sensed that his outward speed had slowed, and a grotesque image came into his mind: Its tongue, covered with that living spittle, extended like a thick rubber band, cracking, bleeding. He saw himself clinging to the tip of that

tongue by his teeth, ripping through it a little at a time, his face bathed in

the convulsive ichor that was Its blood, drowning in Its dead stench, yet still holding on, holding on somehow, while It struggled in Its blind pain and towering rage not to let Its tongue snap back—

(Chüd, this Chüd, stand, be brave, be true, stand for your brother, your friends; believe, believe in all the things you have believed in, believe that if you tell the policeman you’re lost he’ll see that you get home safely, that

there is a Tooth Fairy who lives in a huge enamel castle, and Santa Claus below the North Pole, making toys with his trove of elves, and that Captain

Midnight could be real, yes, he could be in spite of Calvin and Cissy Clark’s big brother Carlton saying that was all a lot of baby stuff, believe that your mother and father will love you again, that courage is possible and words will come smoothly every time; no more Losers, no more cowering in a hole in the ground and calling it a clubhouse, no more crying in Georgie’s room because you couldn’t save him and didn’t know, believe in yourself, believe in the heat of that desire)

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

“OH SHIT, I BELIEVE IN ALL OF THOSE THINGS!” he shouted, and it

was true: even at eleven he had observed that things turned out right a

ridiculous amount of the time. Light flared around him. He raised his arms out and above his head. He turned his face up, and suddenly he felt power rush through him.

He heard It scream again . . . and suddenly he was being drawn back the way he had come, still holding that image of his teeth planted deep in the

strange meat of Its tongue, his teeth locked together like grim old death. He flew through the dark, legs trailing behind him, the tips of his mud-crusted sneaker laces flying like pennants, the wind of this empty place blowing in his ears.

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

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

The voice of the Turtle faded, faded, faded. There was only the rushing dark . . . and then the mouth of a cyclopean tunnel . . . smells of age and decay . . . cobwebs brushing at his face like rotted skeins of silk in a haunted house

. . . moldering tiles blurring by . . . intersections, all dark now, the moon- balloons all gone, and It was screaming, screaming:

—let me go let me go I’ll leave never come back let me GO IT HURTS IT HURTS IT HURRRRRRRRRR

“Thrusts his fists!” Bill screamed, nearly delirious now. He could see light ahead but it was fading, guttering like great candles which had at last burned low . . . and for a moment he saw himself and the others holding

hands in a line, Eddie on one side of him and Richie on the other. He saw his own body, sagging, his head rolled back on his neck, staring up at the Spider, which twisted and whirled like a dervish, Its coarse, spiny legs beating at the floor, poison dripping from Its stinger.

It was screaming in Its death-agony. So Bill honestly believed.

Then he was slamming back into his body with all the impact of a line

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

telephone-pole guywire.

“Don’t touch that, Bill!” Ben yelled, and Bill yanked his hand away in

one quick jerk, leaving a raw place across his palm just below the fingers. It filled with blood and he staggered to his feet, eyes on the Spider.

It was scrabbling away from them, making Its way into the growing

dimness at the back of the chamber as the light failed. It left puddles and pools of black blood behind as It went; somehow their confrontation had ruptured Its insides in a dozen, maybe a hundred places.

“Bill, the web!” Mike screamed. “Look out!”

He stepped backward, craning his neck up, as strands of Its web came floating down, striking the stone-flagged floor on either side of him like the bodies of meaty white snakes. They immediately began to lose shape, to

flow into the cracks between the stones. The web was falling apart, coming loose from its many moorings. One of the bodies, wrapped up like a fly,

came plunging down to strike the floor with a sickening rotted-gourd sound.

“The Spider!” Bill yelled. “Where is It? ”

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

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

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

We have to make sure! If It’s dying or gone back to where It came from,

where the rest of It is, that’s fine. But what if It’s just hurt? What if It can get better? What—

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

“Get back!” Ben yelled at them. “Get away from it, it’s all coming down!” He seized Beverly’s hand and pulled her back toward the child- sized door while Stan struggled to his feet, looked dazedly around, and then

grabbed Eddie. The two of them started toward Ben and Beverly, helping each other, looking like phantoms in the fading light.

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

Mike Hanlon wove his way through them as he would later weave his way through the opposing lines of nearly a dozen high-school football teams, head down, ducking and dodging. Richie joined him. Incredibly,

Richie was laughing, although his hair was standing straight up on his head like the quills of a porcupine. The light grew dimmer, the phosphorescence that had coiled on the walls now dying away.

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

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

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

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

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

Bill’s brain was whirling. Exhaustion tugged at him with thick and clumsy hands. He could not remember ever feeling this tired . . . but in his mind he heard the drawling, almost weary voice of the Turtle: I’d finish it now; don’t let It get away what can be done when you’re eleven can

often never be done again.

“But we have to be sure—”

The shadows were joining hands and now the darkness was almost complete. But before the light failed utterly, he thought he saw the same

hellish doubt on Beverly’s face . . . and in Stan’s eyes. And still, as the last of the light gave way, they could hear the tenebrous whisper-shudder-thump of Its unspeakable web falling to pieces.

Bill in the Void/Late

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

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

—the Turtle was stupid, too stupid to lie. he told you the truth, Little

Buddy . . . the time only comes around once. you hurt me . . . you surprised me. never again. I am the one who called you back. I.

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

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

writer’s block. you must have felt him go, Little Buddy I don’t believe that, either

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

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

But still—

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

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

Richie

The other four watched, paralyzed. It was an exact replay of what had happened before—at first. The Spider, which seemed about to seize Bill and gobble him up, grew suddenly still. Bill’s eyes locked with Its ruby ones.

There was a sense of contact . . . a contact just beyond their ability to divine. But they felt the struggle, the clash of wills.

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

There were bodies there, some half-eaten and half-rotted, and that was the same . . . but high up, in one corner, was another body, and Richie was sure this one was still fresh, possibly even still alive. Beverly had not looked up—her eyes were fixed on Bill and the Spider—but even in his terror, Richie saw the resemblance between Beverly and the woman in the web. Her hair was long and red. Her eyes were open but glassy and

unmoving. A line of spittle had run from the left corner of her mouth down to her chin. She had been attached to one of the web’s main cables by a gossamer harness that went around her waist and under both arms so that

she lolled forward in a half-bow, arms and legs dangling limply. Her feet were bare.

Richie saw another body crumpled at the foot of her web, a man he had never seen before . . . and yet his mind registered an almost subconscious resemblance to the late unlamented Henry Bowers. Blood had run from

both of the stranger’s eyes and caked in a foam around his mouth and on his chin. He—

Then Beverly was screaming. “Something’s wrong! Something’s gone wrong, do something, for Christ’s sake won’t somebody DO something—”

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

Oh Bill, where are you?

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

It means to kill him . . . kill his body, anyway . . . while his mind is

somewhere else. It means to shut him out forever. It’s winning . . . Bill, where are you? For Christ’s sake, where are you?

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

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

despair.

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

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

The Spider stopped laughing, and Richie felt a rising howl of anger and pain inside Its head. Hurt It! he thought triumphantly. Hurt It, how about that, hurt It, and guess what? I’VE GOT ITS TONGUE! I THINK BILL

MISSED IT SOMEHOW BUT WHILE IT WAS DISTRACTED I GOT—

Then, screaming at him, Its cries a hive of furious bees in his head,

Richie was whacked out of himself and into darkness, dimly aware that It was trying to shake him loose. It was doing a pretty good job, too. Terror washed through him, and then was replaced by a sense of cosmic absurdity. He remembered Beverly with his Duncan yo-yo, showing him how to make it sleep, walk the dog, go around the world. And now here he was, Richie

the Human Yo-Yo, and Its tongue was the string. Here he was, and this wasn’t called walking the dog but maybe walking the Spider, and if that wasn’t funny, what was?

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

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

The Spider screamed and shook him furiously, howling Its anger at being surprised again—It had believed only the writer would challenge It, and

now this man who was laughing like a crazy boy had seized It when It was least prepared.

Richie felt himself slipping.

—hold eet a secon, senhorrita, we ees goin out here together or I ain gonna sell you no tickets in la lotería after all, and every one is a big

winner, I swear on my mamma’s name

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

He was flying, all right.

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

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

bill! bill, can you hear me?

—he’s gone, he’s in the deadlights, let me go! LET ME GO! (richie? )

Incredibly distant; incredibly far out in the black. bill! bill! here I am! catch hold! for God’s sake catch hold

—he’s dead, you’re all dead, you’re too old, don’t you understand that? now let me GO! hey bitch, you’re never too old to rock and roll

—LET ME GO! take me to him and maybe I will Richie

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

—let me GOOOO!

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

Richie, no! Go back! It’s the edge of everything up here! The deadlights! souns like what you turn on when you drivinn you hearse at midnie,

senhorr . . . and where is you, honeychile? smile, so I can see where you is!

And suddenly Bill was there, skidding along on

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

one side or the other. And beyond him, coming up fast, Richie could see/sense something that finally dried up his laughter. It was a barrier, something of a strange, non-geometrical shape that his mind could not

grasp. Instead his mind translated it as best it could, as it had translated the shape of It into a Spider, allowing Richie to think of it as a colossal gray wall made of fossilized wooden stakes. These stakes went forever up and forever down, like the bars of a cage. And from between them shone a great blind light. It glared and moved, smiled and snarled. The light was alive.

(deadlights)

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

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

—let me go, you promised to let me GO

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

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

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

YOUR HAND!

Bill’s hand shot out, the fingers opening and closing, that living fire crawling and twisting over Audra’s wedding ring in runic, Moorish patterns

—wheels, crescents, stars, swastikas, linked circles that grew into rolling chains. Bill’s face was overlaid with the same light, making him look tattooed. Richie stretched out as far as he could, hearing It scream and yammer.

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

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

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

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

“Hold on, Big Bill!”

“I got you! Richie, I got you!”

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

They whistled back, that crazy light fading, becoming a series of brilliant pinpoints that finally winked out. They drove through the darkness like torpedoes, Richie gripping Its tongue with his teeth and Bill’s wrist with

one aching hand. There was the Turtle; there and gone in a single eyeblink. Richie sensed them drawing closer to whatever passed for the real world (although he believed he would never think of it as exactly “real” again; he

would see it as a clever canvas scene underlaid with a crisscrossing of

support-cables . . . cables like the strands of a spiderweb). But we’re going to be all right, he thought. We’re going to get back. We—

The buffeting began then—the whipping, slamming, side-to-side flailing as It tried one final time to shake them off and leave them Outside. And

Richie felt his grip slipping. He heard Its guttural roar of triumph and concentrated his being on holding . . . but he continued to slip. He bit down frantically, but Its tongue seemed to be losing substance and reality; it seemed to be becoming gossamer.

“Help!” Richie screamed. “I’m losing it! Help! Somebody help us!”

Eddie

Eddie was half-aware of what was happening; he felt it somehow, saw it somehow, but as if through a gauzy curtain. Somewhere, Bill and Richie

were struggling to come back. Their bodies were here, but the rest of them

—the real of them—was far away.

He had seen the Spider turn to impale Bill with Its stinger, and then

Richie had run forward, yelling at It in that ridiculous Irish Cop’s Voice he used to use . . . only Richie must have improved his act a hell of a lot over

the years, because this Voice sounded eerily like Mr. Nell from the old days.

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

the fade at the end of a pop song. His head had rolled back on his neck, his eyes fixed on Its eyes. The Spider grew quiet again.

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

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

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

He sensed a wild triumph—and that feeling was clearer, sharper. Closer.

They’re coming back! he wanted to shout, but his mouth was too dry, his throat too tight. They’re coming back!

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

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

(help! I’m losing it! somebody help me!)

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

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

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

He leaped at It, triggering the aspirator at the same time, and for an instant all his childhood belief in the medicine came back to him, the childhood medicine that could solve everything, that could make him feel better when the bigger boys roughed him up or when he was knocked over in the rush to get through the doors when school let out or when he had to sit on the edge of the Tracker Brothers’ vacant lot, out of the game because his mother wouldn’t allow him to play baseball. It was good medicine,

strong medicine, and as he leaped into the Spider’s face, smelling Its foul yellow stench, feeling himself overwhelmed by Its single-minded fury and

determination to wipe them all out, he triggered the aspirator into one of Its ruby eyes.

He felt-heard Its scream—no rage this time, only pain, a horrid screaming agony. He saw the mist of droplets settle on that blood-red bulge,

saw the droplets turn white where they landed, saw them sink in as a splash of carbolic acid would sink in; he saw Its huge eye begin to flatten out like a bloody egg-yolk and run in a ghastly stream of living blood and ichor and maggoty pus.

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

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

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

“—eds—”

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

“—eds oh my god bill ben someone he’s lost his arm, his—”

He looked up at Beverly and saw she was crying, the tears coursing down her dirty cheeks as she got an arm under him; he became aware that she had taken off her blouse and was trying to staunch the flow of blood, and that

she was screaming for help. Then he looked at Richie and licked his lips. Fading, fading back. Becoming clearer and clearer, emptying out, all of the impurities flowing out of him so he could become clear, so that the light could flow through, and if he had had time enough he could have preached on this, he could have sermonized: Not bad, he would begin. This is not bad at all. But there was something else he had to say first.

“Richie, ” he whispered.

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

“Don’t call me Eds, ” he said, and smiled. He raised his left hand slowly and touched Richie’s cheek. Richie was crying. “You know I . . . I ”

Eddie closed his eyes, thinking how to finish, and while he was still thinking it over he died.

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

By 7:00 A. M. , the wind-speed in Derry had picked up to about thirty- seven miles an hour, with gusts up to forty-five. Harry Brooks, a National Weather Service forecaster based at Bangor International Airport, made an alarmed call to NWS headquarters in Augusta. The winds, he said, were coming out of the west and blowing in a queer semicircular pattern he had never seen before but it looked to him more and more like some weird

species of pocket hurricane, one that was limited almost exclusively to Derry Township. At 7:10, the major Bangor radio stations broadcast the first severe-weather warnings. The explosion of the power-transformer at Tracker Brothers’ had killed the power all over Derry on the Kansas Street side of the Barrens. At 7:17, a hoary old maple on the Old Cape side of the Barrens fell with a terrific rending crash, flattening a Nite-Owl store on the corner of Merit Street and Cape Avenue. An elderly patron named Raymond Fogarty was killed by a toppling beer cooler. This was the same Raymond Fogarty who, as the minister of the First Methodist Church of

Derry, had presided over the burial rites of George Denbrough in October of 1957. The maple also pulled down enough power lines to knock out the power in both the Old Cape and the somewhat more fashionable Sherburn Woods development beyond it. The clock in the steeple of the Grace Baptist Church had chimed neither six nor seven. At 7:20, three minutes after the

maple fell in the Old Cape and about an hour and fifteen minutes after every toilet and domestic drain over there had suddenly reversed itself, the clock in the tower chimed thirteen times. A minute later, a blue-white stroke of lightning struck the steeple. Heather Libby, the minister’s wife, happened

to be looking out the window of the parsonage’s kitchen at the time, and she said that the steeple “exploded like someone loaded it up with dynamite.” Whitewashed boards, chunks of beams, and clockwork from Switzerland showered down on the street. The ragged remains of the steeple burned briefly and then guttered out in the rain, which was now a tropical downpour. The streets leading downhill into the downtown shopping area foamed and ran. The progress of the Canal under Main Street had become a steady shaking thunder that made people look at each other uneasily. At 7:25, with the titanic crash of the Grace Baptist steeple still reverberating all over Derry, the janitor who came into Wally’s Spa every morning except Sunday to swamp the place out saw something which sent him screaming into the street. This fellow, who had been an alcoholic ever since his first semester at the University of Maine lo these eleven years ago, was paid a

pittance for his services—his real pay, it was understood, was his absolute freedom to finish up anything left in the beer kegs under the bar from the night before. Richie Tozier might or might not have remembered him; he was Vincent Caruso Taliendo, better known to his fifth-grade

contemporaries as “Boogers” Taliendo. As he was mopping up on that

apocalyptic morning in Derry, working his way gradually closer and closer to the serving area, he saw all seven of the beer taps—three Bud, two Narragansett, one Schlitz (known more familiarly to the bleary patrons of Wally’s as Slits), and one Miller Lite—nod forward, as if pulled by seven

invisible hands. Beer ran from them in streams of gold-white foam. Vince started forward, thinking not of ghosts or phantoms but of his morning’s dividend going down the drain. Then he skidded to a stop, eyes widening, and a wailing, horrified scream rose in the empty, beer-smelling cave that

was Wally’s Spa. Beer had given way to arterial streams of blood. It swirled in the chromium drains, overflowed, and ran down the side of the bar in

little streamlets. Now hair and chunks of flesh began to splurt out of the beer-taps. “Boogers” Taliendo watched this, transfixed, not even able to summon enough strength to scream again. Then there was a thudding,

toneless blast as one of the beer kegs under the counter exploded. All of the cupboard doors under the bar swung wide. Greenish smoke, like the aftermath of a magician’s trick, began to drift out of them. “Boogers” had seen enough. Screaming, he fled into the street, which was now a shallow canal. He fell on his butt, got up, and threw a terrified glance back over his

shoulder. One of the bar windows blew out with a loud shooting-gallery sound. Whickers of broken glass whistled all around Vince’s head. A moment later the other window exploded. Once again he was miraculously untouched . . . but he decided on the spur of the moment that the time had come to see his sister up Eastport. He started off at once, and his journey to the Derry town limits and beyond would make a saga in itself . . . but

suffice it to say that he did eventually get out of town. Others were not so lucky. Aloysius Nell, who had turned seventy-seven not long since, was sitting with his wife in the parlor of their home on Strapham Street, watching the storm pound Derry. At 7:32, he suffered a fatal stroke. His wife told her brother a week later that Aloysius dropped his coffee cup on the rug, sat bolt-upright, his eyes wide and staring, and screamed: “Here,

here, me foine girl! Just what in the hell do ye think ye’re doin? Belay that guff before I snatch yer pettiskirrrr—” Then he fell out of his chair, smashing his coffee cup under him. Maureen Nell, who knew well how bad his ticker had been for the last three years, understood immediately that all was over with him, and after loosening his collar she had run for the

telephone to call Father McDowell. But the phone was out of order. A funny noise like a police siren was all it would make. And so, although she knew it was probably a blasphemy she would have to answer for to Saint Peter, she had attempted to give him the last rites herself. She felt confident, she told her brother, that God would understand even if Saint Peter didn’t.

Aloysius had been a good husband and a good man, and if he drank too much, that was only the Irish in him coming out. At 7:49 a series of

explosions shook the Derry Mall, which stood on the site of the defunct Kitchener Ironworks. No one was killed; the mall didn’t open until 10:00, and the five-man janitorial squad hadn’t been due to arrive until 8:00 (and on such a morning as this, very few of them would have shown up anyway). A team of investigators later dismissed the idea of sabotage. They suggested—rather vaguely—that the explosions had probably been caused by water which had seeped into the mall’s electrical system. Whatever the reason, no one was going to go shopping at the Derry Mall for a long time. One explosion totally wiped out Zale’s Jewelry Store. Diamond rings, ID bracelets, strings of pearls, trays of wedding rings, and Seiko digital

watches flew everywhere in a hail of bright, sparkly trinkets. A music-box flew the length of the east corridor and landed in the fountain outside of the

J. C. Penney’s, where it briefly played a bubbly rendition of the theme from

Love Story before shutting down. The same blast tore a hole through the Baskin-Robbins next door, turning the thirty-one flavors into ice-cream soup that ran away along the floor in cloudy runnels. The blast which tore through Sears lifted off a chunk of the roof and the rising wind sailed it away like a kite; it came down a thousand yards away, slicing cleanly through the silo of a farmer named Brent Kilgallon. Kilgallon’s sixteen- year-old son rushed out with his mother’s Kodak and took a picture. The

National Enquirer bought it for sixty dollars, which the boy used to buy two new tires for his Yamaha motorcycle. A third explosion ripped through Hit or Miss, sending flaming skirts, jeans, and underwear out into the flooded parking-lot. And a final explosion tore open the mall branch of the Derry Farmers’ Trust like a rotted box of crackers. A chunk of the bank’s roof was also torn off. Burglar alarms went off with a bray that would not be silenced until the security system’s independent wiring hookup was shorted out four hours later. Loan contracts, banking instruments, deposit slips, cash-drawer chits, and Money-Manager forms were lifted into the sky and blown away by the rising wind. And money: tens and twenties mostly, with a generous helping of fives and a soupçon of fifties and hundreds. Better than $75, 000 blew away, according to the bank’s officers. Later, after a mass shakeup

in the bank’s executive structure (and an FSLIC bail-out), some would admit—strictly off the record, of course—that it had been more like $200,

000. A woman in Haven Village named Rebecca Paulson found a fifty- dollar bill fluttering from her back-door welcome mat, two twenties in her bird-house, and a hundred plastered against an oak tree in her back yard.

She and her husband used the money to make an extra two payments on their Bombardier Skidoo. Dr. Hale, a retired doctor who had lived on West Broadway for nearly fifty years, was killed at 8:00 A. M. Dr. Hale liked to boast that he had taken the same two-mile walk from his West Broadway

home and around Derry Park and the Elementary School for the last twenty- five of those fifty years. Nothing stopped him; not rain, sleet, hail, howling nor’easters, or subzero cold. He set out on the morning of May 31st in spite of his housekeeper’s worried fussings. His exit-line from the world, spoken back over his shoulder as he went through the front door, pulling his hat firmly down to his ears, was: “Don’t be so goddamned silly, Hilda. This is nothing but a capful of rain. You should have seen it in ’57! That was a

storm!” As Dr. Hale turned back onto West Broadway, a manhole cover in front of the Mueller place suddenly lifted off like the payload of a Redstone rocket. It decapitated the good doctor so quickly and neatly that he walked on another three steps before collapsing, dead, on the sidewalk.

And the wind continued to rise.

Under the City/4:15 P. M.

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

They could still hear the dim thunder of water in the drains, but the

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

Bill was scared . . . plenty scared. The conversation he’d had with his father in his father’s shop kept coming back to him. There’s nine pounds of blueprints that just disappeared somewhere along the line. My point is

that nobody knows where all the damned sewers and drains go, or why. When they work, nobody cares. When they don’t, there’s three or four sad sacks from Derry Water who have to try and find out which pump went

flooey or where the plug-up is. It’s dark and smelly and there are rats.

Those are all good reasons to stay out, but the best reason is that you could get lost. It’s happened before.

Happened before. Happened before. It’s happened—

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

Bill felt panic trying to rise and pushed it back. It went, but not easily. He could feel it back there, a live thing, struggling and twisting, trying to get out. Adding to it was the nagging unanswerable question of whether they had killed It or not. Richie said yes, Mike said yes, so did Eddie. But he

hadn’t liked the frightened doubtful look on Bev’s face, or on Stan’s, as the light died and they crawled back through the small door, away from the susurating collapsing web.

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

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

Something else was troubling him, but the concept was too large and too vague for his tired boy’s mind to grasp. Perhaps it was the very simplicity of the idea that made it elusive: they were falling away from each other. The bond that had held them all this long summer was dissolving. It had been faced and vanquished. It might be dead, as Richie and Eddie thought, or It might be wounded so badly It would sleep for a hundred years, or a thousand, or ten thousand. They had faced It, seen It with Its final mask laid aside, and It had been horrible enough—oh, for sure!—but once seen, Its physical form was not so bad and Its most potent weapon was taken away from It. They all had, after all, seen spiders before. They were alien and

somehow crawlingly dreadful, and he supposed that none of them would ever be able to see another one

(if we ever get out of this)

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

(the deadlights)

whatever had been out there, but perhaps even that unspeakable living light which crouched at the doorway to the macroverse was dead or dying. The deadlights, and the trip into the black to the place where they had been,

was already growing hazy and hard to recall in his mind. And that wasn’t really the point. The point, felt but not grasped, was simply that the fellowship was ending . . . it was ending and they were still in the dark.

That Other had, through their friendship, perhaps been able to make them something more than children. But they were becoming children again. Bill felt it as much as the others.

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

“I d-d-don’t nuh-nuh-know, ” Bill said. His stutter was back, alive and well. He heard it, they heard it, and he stood in the dark, smelling the sodden aroma of their growing panic, wondering how long it would be

before somebody—Stan, most likely it would be Stan—tore things wide open by saying: Well, why don’t you know? You got us into this!

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

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

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

“I have an idea, ” Beverly said quietly.

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

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

“I know something, ” Beverly said in the dark, and to Bill her voice sounded older. “I know because my father told me. I know how to bring us back together. And if we’re not together we’ll never get out. ”

“What? ” Ben asked, sounding bewildered and terrified. “What are you talking about? ”

“Something that will bring us together forever. Something that will show

—”

“Nuh-Nuh-No, B-B-Beverly!” Bill said, suddenly understanding, understanding everything.

“—that will show that I love you all, ” Beverly said, “that you’re all my friends. ”

“What’s she t—” Mike began.

Calmly, Beverly cut across his words. “Who’s first? ” she asked. “I think

In the Lair of It/1985

he’s dying, ” Beverly wept. ”His arm, It ate his arm—” She reached for Bill, clung to him, and Bill shook her off.

“It’s getting away again!” he roared at her. Blood caked his lips and chin. “Cuh-Cuh-Come on! Richie! B-B-Ben! This tuh-time we’re g-g-going to fuh-hinish her!”

Richie turned Bill toward him, looked at him as you would look at a man who is hopelessly raving. “Bill, we have to take care of Eddie. We have to get a tourniquet on him, get him out of here. ”

But Beverly was now sitting with Eddie’s head in her lap, cradling him. She had closed his eyes. “Go with Bill, ” she said. “If you let him die for nothing . . . if It comes back in another twenty-five years, or fifty, or even two thousand, I swear I’ll . . . I’ll haunt your ghosts. Go!”

Richie looked at her for a moment, indecisive. Then he became aware that her face was losing definition, becoming not a face but a pale shape in the growing shadows. The light was fading. It decided him. “All right, ” he said to Bill. “This time we chase. ”

Ben was standing in back of the spiderweb, which had begun to decay again. He had also seen the shape swaying high up in it, and he prayed that Bill would not look up.

But as the web began to fall in drifts and strands and skeins, Bill did.

He saw Audra, sagging as if in a very old and creaky elevator. She dropped ten feet, stopped, swaying from side to side, and then abruptly

dropped another fifteen. Her face never changed. Her eyes, china-blue,

were wide open. Her bare feet swung back and forth like pendulums. Her hair hung lankly over her shoulders. Her mouth was ajar.

“AUDRA!” he screamed. “Bill, come on!” Ben shouted.

The web was falling all around them now, thudding to the floor and beginning to run. Richie suddenly grabbed Bill around the waist and propelled him forward, shooting for a ten-foot-high gap between the floor and the bottommost cross-strand of the sagging web. “Go, Bill! Go! Go!”

“That’s Audra!” Bill shouted desperately. “Thuh-That’s AUDRA!”

“I don’t give a shit if it’s the Pope, ” Richie said grimly. “Eddie’s dead and we’re going to kill It, if It’s still alive. We’re going to finish the job this time, Big Bill. Either she’s alive or she’s not. Now come on!”

Bill hung back a moment longer, and then snapshots of the children, all the dead children, seemed to flutter through his mind like lost photographs from George’s album. SCHOOL

FRIENDS.

“A-All ruh-right. Let’s g-go. Guh-Guh-God forgive m-me. ”

He and Richie ran under the strand of cross-webbing seconds before it collapsed, and joined Ben on the other side. They ran after It as Audra swung and dangled fifty feet above the stone floor, wrapped in a numbing cocoon that was attached to the decaying web.

Ben

They followed the trail of Its black blood—oily pools of ichor that ran and dripped into the cracks between the flagstones. But as the floor began to

rise toward a semicircular black opening at the far side of the chamber, Ben saw something new: a trail of eggs. Each was black and rough-shelled,

perhaps as big as an ostrich-egg. A waxy light shone from within them. Ben

realized they were semitransparent; he could see black shapes moving inside.

Its children, he thought, and felt his gorge rise. Its miscarried children.

God! God!

Richie and Bill had stopped and were staring at the eggs with stupid, dazed wonder.

“Go on! Go on!” Ben shouted. “I’ll take care of them! Get It!”

“Here!” Richie shouted, and threw Ben a pack of Derry Town House matches.

Ben caught them. Bill and Richie ran on. Ben watched them in the rapidly dimming light for a moment. They ran into the darkness of Its

escape-passage and were lost from sight. Then he looked down at the first of the thin-shelled eggs, at the black, mantalike shadow inside, and felt his determination waver. This . . . hey guys, this was too much. This was simply too awful. And surely they would die without his help; they had not been so much laid as dropped.

But Its time was close . . . and if one of them is capable of surviving . . . even one . . .

Summoning all of his courage, summoning up Eddie’s pale, dying face, Ben brought one Desert Driver boot down on the first egg. It broke with a sodden squelch as some stinking placenta ran out around his boot. Then a spider the size of a rat was scrabbling weakly across the floor, trying to get away, and Ben could hear it in his head, its high mewling cries like the sound of a handsaw being bent rapidly back and forth so that it makes ghost-music.

Ben lurched after it on legs that felt like stilts and brought his foot down again. He felt the spider’s body crunch and splatter under the heel of his boot. His gorge clenched and this time there was no way he could hold back. He vomited, then twisted his heel, grinding the thing into the stones, listening to the cries in his head fade to nothing.

How many? How many eggs? Didn’t I read somewhere that spiders can lay thousands . . . or millions? I can’t keep doing this, I’ll go mad—

You have to. You have to. Come on, Ben . . . get it together!

He went to the next egg and repeated the process in the last of the dying light. Everything was repeated: the brittle snap, the squelch of liquid, the final coup de grace. The next. The next. The next. Making his way slowly

toward the black arch into which his friends had gone. The darkness was complete now, Beverly and the decaying web somewhere behind him. He could still hear the whisper of its collapse. The eggs were pallid stones in

the dark. As he reached each one he struck a light from the matchbook and broke it open. In each case he was able to follow the course of the dazed spiderling and crush it before the light flickered out. He had no idea how he was going to proceed if his matches gave out before he had crushed the last of the eggs and killed each one’s unspeakable cargo.

It/1985

Still coming.

It sensed them still coming, gaining, and Its fear grew. Perhaps It was not eternal after all—the unthinkable must finally be thought. Worse, It sensed

the death of Its young. A third of these hated hateful men-boys was walking steadily up Its trail of birth, almost insane with revulsion but continuing nonetheless, methodically stamping the life from each of Its eggs.

No! It wailed, lurching from side to side, feeling Its life-force running from a hundred wounds, none of them mortal in itself, but each a song of

pain, each slowing It. One of Its legs hung by a single living twist of meat.

One of Its eyes was blind. It sensed a terrible rupture inside, the result of

whatever poison one of the hated men-boys had managed to shoot down Its throat.

And still they came on, closing the distance, and how could this happen?

It whined and mewled, and when It sensed them almost directly behind, It did the only thing It could do now: It turned to fight.

Beverly

Before the last of the light faded and utter dark closed down, she saw Bill’s wife plunge another twenty feet and then fetch up again. She had begun to spin, her long red hair fanning out. His wife, she thought. But I was his first love, and if he thought some other woman was his first, it was only because he forgot . . . forgot Derry.

Then she was in darkness, alone with the sound of the falling web and Eddie’s simple moveless weight. She didn’t want to let him go, didn’t want to let his face lie on the foul floor of this place. So she held his head in the crook of an arm that had gone mostly numb and brushed his hair away from his damp forehead. She thought of the birds . . . that was something she supposed she had gotten from Stan. Poor Stan, who hadn’t been able to face this.

All of them . . . I was their first love.

She tried to remember it—it was something good to think about in all this darkness, where you couldn’t place the sounds. It made her feel less alone.

At first it wouldn’t come; the image of the birds intervened—crows and

grackles and starlings, spring birds that came back from somewhere while the streets were still running with meltwater and the last patches of crusted dirty snow clung grimly to their shady places.

It seemed to her that it was always on a cloudy day that you first heard and saw those spring birds and wondered where they came from. Suddenly they were just back in Derry, filling the white air with their raucous chatter. They lined the telephone wires and roofpeaks of the Victorian houses on West Broadway; they jostled for places on the aluminum branches of the

elaborate TV antenna on top of Wally’s Spa; they loaded the wet black branches of the elms on Lower Main Street. They settled, they talked to each other in the screamy babbling voices of old countrywomen at the

weekly Grange Bingo games, and then, at some signal which humans could not discern, they all took wing at once, turning the sky black with their

numbers . . . and came down somewhere else.

Yes, the birds, I was thinking of them because I was ashamed. It was my father who made me ashamed, I guess, and maybe that was Its doing, too. Maybe.

The memory came—the memory behind the birds—but it was vague and disconnected. Perhaps this one always would be. She had—

Her thoughts broke off as she realized that Eddie

Love and Desire/August 10th, 1958

comes to her first, because he is the most frightened. He comes to her not as her friend of that summer, or as her brief lover now, but the way he would have come to his mother only three or four years ago, to be comforted; he doesn’t draw back from her smooth nakedness and at first she doubts if he even feels it. He is trembling, and although she holds him the

darkness is so perfect that even this close she cannot see him; except for the rough cast he might as well be a phantom.

“What do you want? ” he asks her.

“You have to put your thing in me, ” she says.

He tries to pull back but she holds him and he subsides against her. She has heard someone—Ben, she thinks—draw in his breath.

“Bevvie, I can’t do that. I don’t know how—”

“I think it’s easy. But you’ll have to get undressed. ” She thinks about the intricacies of managing cast and shirt, first somehow separating and then rejoining them, and amends, “Your pants, anyway. ”

“No, I can’t!” But she thinks part of him can, and wants to, because his trembling has stopped and she feels something small and hard which

presses against the right side of her belly.

“You can, ” she says, and pulls him down. The surface beneath her bare back and legs is firm, clayey, dry. The distant thunder of the water is

drowsy, soothing. She reaches for him. There’s a moment when her father’s face intervenes, harsh and forbidding

(I want to see if you’re intact)

and then she closes her arms around Eddie’s neck, her smooth cheek against his smooth cheek, and as he tentatively touches her small breasts

she sighs and thinks for the first time This is Eddie and she remembers a

day in July—could it only have been last month?—when no one else turned up in the Barrens but Eddie, and he had a whole bunch of Little Lulu comic books and they read together for most of the afternoon, Little Lulu looking for beebleberries and getting in all sorts of crazy situations, Witch Hazel, all of those guys. It had been fun.

She thinks of birds; in particular of the grackles and starlings and crows that come back in the spring, and her hands go to his belt and loosen it, and he says again that he can’t do that; she tells him that he can, she knows he can, and what she feels is not shame or fear now but a kind of triumph.

“Where? ” he says, and that hard thing pushes urgently against her inner thigh.

“Here, ” she says.

“Bevvie, I’ll fall on you!” he says, and she hears his breath start to whistle painfully.

“I think that’s sort of the idea, ” she tells him and holds him gently and guides him. He pushes forward too fast and there is pain.

Ssssss!—she draws her breath in, her teeth biting at her lower lip and thinks of the birds again, the spring birds, lining the roofpeaks of houses, taking wing all at once under low March clouds.

“Beverly? ” he says uncertainly. “Are you okay? ”

“Go slower, ” she says. “It’ll be easier for you to breathe. ” He does move more slowly, and after awhile his breathing speeds up but she

understands this is not because there is anything wrong with him.

The pain fades. Suddenly he moves more quickly, then stops, stiffens, and makes a sound—some sound. She senses that this is something for him, something extraordinarily special, something like . . . like flying. She feels powerful: she feels a sense of triumph rise up strongly within her. Is this what her father was afraid of? Well he might be! There was power in this act, all right, a chain-breaking power that was blood-deep. She feels no physical pleasure, but there is a kind of mental ecstasy in it for her. She

senses the closeness. He puts his face against her neck and she holds him He’s crying. She holds him. And feels the part of him that made a connection between them begin to fade. It is not leaving her, exactly; it is simply fading, becoming less.

When his weight shifts away she sits up and touches his face in the darkness.

“Did you? ” “Did I what? ”

“Whatever it is. I don’t know, exactly. ”

He shakes his head—she feels it with her hand against his cheek.

“I don’t think it was exactly like . . . you know, like the big boys say. But it was . . . it was really something. He speaks low so the others can’t hear. ”I

love you, Bevvie. ”

Her consciousness breaks down a little there. She’s quite sure there’s

more talk, some whispered, some loud, and can’t remember what is said. It doesn’t matter. Does she have to talk each of them into it all over again?

Yes, probably. But it doesn’t matter. They have to be talked into it, this essential human link between the world and the infinite, the only place

where the bloodstream touches eternity. It doesn’t matter. What matters is love and desire. Here in this dark is as good a place as any. Better than some, maybe.

Mike comes to her, then Richie, and the act is repeated. Now she feels

some pleasure, dim heat in her childish unmatured s*x, and she closes her eyes as Stan comes to her and she thinks of the birds, spring and the birds, and she sees them, again and again, all lighting at once, filling up the

winter-naked trees, shockwave riders on the moving edge of nature’s most violent season, she sees them take wing again and again, the flutter of their wings like the snap of many sheets on the line, and she thinks: A month from now every kid in Derry Park will have a kite, they’ll run to keep the

strings from getting tangled with each other. She thinks again: This is what flying is like.

With Stan as with the others, there is that rueful sense of fading, of leaving, with whatever they truly need from this act—some ultimate—close but as yet unfound.

“Did you? ” she asks again, and although she doesn’t know exactly what “it” is, she knows that he hasn’t.

There is a long wait, and then Ben comes to her.

He is trembling all over, but it is not the fearful trembling she felt in Stan. “Beverly, I can’t, ” he says in a tone which purports to be reasonable and

is anything but.

“You can too. I can feel it. ”

She sure can. There’s more of this hardness; more of him. She can feel it below the gentle push of his belly. Its size raises a certain curiosity and she touches the bulge lightly. He groans against her neck, and the blow of his breath causes her bare body to dimple with goosebumps. She feels the first twist of real heat race through her—suddenly the feeling in her is very

large; she recognizes that it is too big

(and is he too big, can she take that into herself? )

and too old for her, something, some feeling that walks in boots. This is like Henry’s M-80s, something not meant for kids, something that could

explode and blow you up. But this was not the place or time for worry; here there was love, desire, and the dark. If they didn’t try for the first two they would surely be left with the last.

“Beverly, don’t—” “Yes. ”

“I . . . ”

“Show me how to fly, ” she says with a calmness she doesn’t feel, aware by the fresh wet warmth on her cheek and neck that he has begun to cry.

“Show me, Ben. ”

“No . . . ”

“If you wrote the poem, show me. Feel my hair if you want to, Ben. It’s all right. ”

“Beverly . . . I . . . I . . . ”

He’s not just trembling now; he’s shaking all over. But she senses again that this ague is not all fear—part of it is the precursor of the throe this act is all about. She thinks of

(the birds)

his face, his dear sweet earnest face, and knows it is not fear; it is wanting he feels, a deep passionate wanting now barely held in check, and she feels that sense of power again, something like flying, something like looking down from above and seeing all the birds on the roofpeaks, on the TV antenna atop Wally’s, seeing streets spread out maplike, oh desire, right, this was something, it was love and desire that taught you to fly.

“Ben! Yes!” she cries suddenly, and the leash breaks.

She feels pain again, and for a moment there is the frightening sensation of being crushed. Then he props himself up on the palms of his hands and

that feeling is gone.

He’s big, oh yes—the pain is back, and it’s much deeper than when Eddie first entered her. She has to bite her lip again and think of the birds until the burning is gone. But it does go, and she is able to reach up and touch his

lips with one finger, and he moans.

The heat is back, and she feels her power suddenly shift to him; she gives it gladly and goes with it. There is a sensation first of being rocked, of a

delicious spiralling sweetness which makes her begin to turn her head

helplessly from side to side, and a tuneless humming comes from between her closed lips, this is flying, this, oh love, oh desire, oh this is something

impossible to deny, binding, giving, making a strong circle: binding, giving .

. . flying.

“Oh Ben, oh my dear, yes, ” she whispers, feeling the sweat stand out on her face, feeling their connection, something firmly in place, something like eternity, the number 8 rocked over on its side. “I love you so much, dear. ”

And she feels the thing begin to happen—something of which the girls who whisper and giggle about s*x in the girls’ room have no idea, at least as far as she knows; they only marvel at how gooshy s*x must be, and now she realizes that for many of them s*x must be some unrealized undefined monster; they refer to the act as It. Would you do It, do your sister and her boyfriend do It, do your mom and dad still do It, and how they never intend to do It; oh yes, you would think that the whole girls’ side of the fifth-grade class was made up of spinsters-to-be, and it is obvious to Beverly that none of them can suspect this . . . this conclusion, and she is only kept from

screaming by her knowledge that the others will hear and think her badly hurt. She puts the side of her hand in her mouth and bites down hard. She understands the screamy laughter of Greta Bovvie and Sally Mueller and all the others better now: hadn’t they, the seven of them, spent most of this, the longest, scariest summer of their lives, laughing like loons? You laugh

because what’s fearful and unknown is also what’s funny, you laugh the way a small child will sometimes laugh and cry at the same time when a capering circus clown approaches, knowing it is supposed to be funny . . . but it is also unknown, full of the unknown’s eternal power.

Biting her hand will not stay the cry, and she can only reassure them— and Ben—by crying out her affirmative in the darkness.

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” Glorious images of flight fill her head, mixing with the harsh calling of the grackles and starlings; these sounds become the world’s sweetest music.

So she flies, she flies up, and now the power is not with her or with him but somewhere between them, and he cries out, and she can feel his arms

trembling, and she arches up and into him, feeling his spasm, his touch, his total fleeting intimacy with her in the dark. They break through into the lifelight together.

Then it is over and they are in each other’s arms and when he tries to say something—perhaps some stupid apology that would hurt what she remembers, some stupid apology like a handcuff, she stops his words with a kiss and sends him away.

Bill comes to her.

He tries to say something, but his stutter is almost total now.

“You be quiet, ” she says, secure in her new knowledge, but aware that

she is tired now. Tired and damned sore. The insides and backs of her thighs feel sticky, and she thinks it’s maybe because Ben actually finished, or

maybe because she is bleeding. “Everything is going to be totally okay. ” “A-A-Are you shuh-shuh-shuh-hure? ”

“Yes, ” she says, and links her hands behind his neck, feeling the sweaty mat of his hair. “You just bet. ”

“Duh-duh-does ih-ih . . . does ih-ih-ih—” “Shhh . . . ”

It is not as it was with Ben; there is passion, but not the same kind. Being with Bill now is the best conclusion to this that there could be. He is kind; tender; just short of calm. She senses his eagerness, but it is tempered and held back by his anxiety for her, perhaps because only Bill and she herself realize what an enormous act this is, and how it must never be spoken of, not to anyone else, not even to each other.

At the end, she is surprised by that sudden upsurge and she has time to think: Oh! It’s going to happen again, I don’t know if I can stand it—

But her thoughts are swept away by the utter sweetness of it, and she

barely hears him whispering, “I love you, Bev, I love you, I’ll always love you” saying it over and over and not stuttering at all.

She hugs him to her and for a moment they stay that way, his smooth cheek against hers.

He withdraws from her without saying anything and for a little while she’s alone, pulling her clothes back together, slowly putting them on,

aware of a dull throbbing pain of which they, being male, will never know, aware also of a certain exhausted pleasure and the relief of having it over.

There is an emptiness down there now, and although she is glad that her s*x is her own again, the emptiness imparts a strange melancholy which she could never express . . . except to think of bare trees under a white winter

sky, empty trees, trees waiting for blackbirds to come like ministers at the end of March to preside over the death of snow.

She finds them by groping for their hands.

For a moment no one speaks and when someone does, it does not

surprise her much that it’s Eddie. “I think when we went right two turns back, we shoulda gone left. Jeez, I knew that, but I was so sweaty and frigged up—”

“Been frigged up your whole life, Eds, ” Richie says. His voice is pleasant. The raw edge of panic is completely gone.

“We went wrong some other places too, ” Eddie says, ignoring him, “but that’s the worst one. If we can find our way back there, we just might be

okay. ”

They form up in a clumsy line, Eddie first, Beverly second now, her hand on Eddie’s shoulder as Mike’s is on hers. They begin to move again, faster this time. Eddie displays none of his former nervous care.

We’re going home, she thinks, and shivers with relief and joy. Home, yes. And that will be good. We’ve done our job, what we came for, now we can go back to just being kids again. And that will be good, too.

As they move through the dark she realizes the sound of running water is closer.

‌CHAPTER 23‌

Out

Derry/9:00-10:00 A. M.

By ten past nine, Derry windspeeds were being clocked at an average of fifty-five miles an hour, with gusts up to seventy. The anemometer in the

courthouse registered one gust of eighty-one, and then the needle dropped all the way back to zero. The wind had ripped the whirling cuplike device on the courthouse roof off its moorings and it flew away into the rainswept dimness of the day. Like George Denbrough’s boat, it was never seen again.

By nine-thirty, the thing the Derry Water Department had sworn was now impossible seemed not only possible but imminent: that downtown Derry

might be flooded for the first time since August of 1958, when many of the old drains had clogged up or caved in during a freak rainstorm. By quarter of ten, men with grim faces were arriving in cars and pick-up trucks along both sides of the Canal, their foul-weather gear rippling crazily in the freight-train wind. For the first time since October of 1957, sandbags began to go up along the Canal’s cement sides. The arch where the Canal went under the three-way intersection at the heart of Derry’s downtown area was full almost to the top; Main Street, Canal Street, and the foot of Up-Mile Hill were impassable except by foot, and those who splashed and hurried their way toward the sandbagging operation felt the very streets beneath their feet trembling with the frenzied flow of the water, the way a turnpike

overpass will tremble when big trucks pass each other. But this was a steady vibration, and the men were glad to be on the north side of downtown, away from that steady rumbling that was felt rather than heard. Harold Gardener

shouted at Alfred Zitner, who ran Zitner’s Realty on the west side of town, asked him if the streets were going to collapse. Zitner said hell would freeze over before something like that happened. Harold had a brief image of Adolf Hitler and Judas Iscariot handing out ice-skates and went on heaving sandbags. The water was now less than three inches below the top of the Canal’s cement walls. In the Barrens the Kenduskeag was already out of its banks, and by noon the luxuriant undergrowth and scrub trees would be poking out of a vast shallow, stinking lake. The men continued to work, pausing only when the supply of sandbags ran out . . . and then, at ten of ten, they were frozen by a great rending ripping sound. Harold Gardener later told his wife he thought maybe the end of the world had come. It wasn’t downtown falling into the earth—not then—it was the Standpipe.

Only Andrew Keene, Norbert Keene’s grandson, actually saw it happen, and he had smoked so much Colombian Red that morning that at first he thought it had to be a hallucination. He had been wandering Derry’s stormswept streets since about eight o’clock, roughly the same time that Dr. Hale was ascending to that great family medical practice in the sky. He was drenched to the skin (except for the two-ounce baggie of pot tucked up into his armpit, that was) but totally unaware of it. His eyes widened in disbelief. He had reached Memorial Park, which stood on the flank of

Standpipe Hill. And unless he was wrong, the Standpipe now had a pronounced lean, like that fucked-up tower in Pisa that was on all the macaroni boxes. “Oh, wow!” Andrew Keene cried, his eyes widening even more—they looked as if they might be on small tough springs now—as the splintering sounds began. The Standpipe’s lean was becoming more and

more acute as he stood there with his jeans plastered to his skinny shanks and his drenched paisley headband dripping water into his eyes. White

shingles were popping off the downtown side of the great round water- tower . . . no, not exactly popping off; it was more like they were squirting off. And a definite crinkle had appeared about twenty feet above the Standpipe’s stone foundation. Water suddenly began to spray out through

this crinkle, and now the shingles weren’t squirting off the Standpipe’s downtown side; they were spewing into the windstream. A rending sound began to come from the Standpipe, and Andrew could see it moving, like the hand of a great clock inclining from noon to one to two. The baggie of

pot fell out of his armpit and fetched up inside his shirt somewhere near his

belt. He didn’t notice. He was utterly fetched. Large twanging sounds came from inside the Standpipe, as if the strings of the world’s biggest guitar

were being broken one by one. These were the cables inside the cylinder, which had provided the proper balance of stress against the water-pressure. The Standpipe began to heel over faster and faster, boards and beams ripping apart, splinters jumping and whirling into the air. “FAAAR

FUCKING OWWWWT!” Andrew Keene shrieked, but it was lost in the Standpipe’s final crashing fall, and by the rising sound of one and three-

quarters million gallons of water, seven thousand tons of water, pouring out of the building’s ruptured spouting side. It went in a gray tidal wave, and of course if Andrew Keene had been on the downhill side of the Standpipe, he would have exited the world in no time. But God favors drunks, small children, and the cataclysmically stoned; Andrew was standing in a place where he could see it all and not be touched by a single drop. “GREAT

FUCKING SPECIAL EFFECTS!” Andrew screamed as the water rolled over Memorial Park like a solid thing, sweeping away the sundial beside which a small boy named Stan Uris had often stood watching birds with his father’s field glasses. “STEVEN SPIELBERG EAT YOUR HEART OUT!” The stone birdbath also went. Andrew saw it for a moment, turning over and over, pedestal for dish and dish for pedestal, and then it was gone. A

line of maples and birches separating Memorial Park from Kansas Street were knocked down like so many pins in a bowling alley. They took wild spiky snarls of power lines with them. The water rolled across the street,

beginning to spread now, beginning to look more like water than that mind- boggling solid wall that had taken sundial, birdbath, and trees, but it still had power enough to sweep almost a dozen houses on the far side of

Kansas Street off their foundations and into the Barrens. They went with sickening ease, most of them still whole. Andrew Keene recognized one of them as belonging to the Karl Massensik family. Mr. Massensik had been his sixth-grade teacher, a real pooch. As the house went over the edge and

down the slope, Andrew realized he could still see a candle burning brightly in one window, and he wondered briefly if he might be mentally highsiding it, if you could dig the concept. There was an explosion from the Barrens and a brief gout of yellow flame as someone’s Coleman gas lantern ignited oil pouring out of a ruptured fuel-tank. Andrew stared at the far side of

Kansas Street, where until just forty seconds ago there had been a neat line

of middle-class houses. They were Gone City now, and you better believe it, sweet thing. In their places were ten cellar-holes that looked like swimming-pools. Andrew wanted to advance the opinion that this was far fucking out, but he couldn’t yell anymore. Seemed like his yeller was busted. His diaphragm felt weak and useless. He heard a series of crunching thuds, the sound of a giant with his shoes full of Ritz crackers marching down a flight of stairs. It was the Standpipe rolling down the hill, a huge

white cylinder still spouting the last of its water supply, the thick cables that had helped to hold it together flying into the air and then cracking down again like steel bullwhips, digging runnels in the soft earth that immediately filled up with rushing rainwater. As Andrew watched, with his chin resting somewhere between his collarbones, the Standpipe, horizontal now, better than a hundred and twenty-five feet long, flew out into the air. For a moment it seemed frozen there, a surreal image straight out of rubber- walled strait-jacketed toodle-oo land, rainwater sparkling on its shattered sides, its windows broken, casements hanging, the flashing light on top, meant as a warning for low-flying light planes, still flashing, and then it fell into the street with a final rending crash. Kansas Street had channelled a lot of the water, and now it began to rush toward downtown by way of Up-

Mile Hill. There used to be houses over there, Andrew Keene thought, and suddenly all the strength ran out of his legs. He sat down heavily— kersplash. He stared at the broken stone foundation on which the Standpipe had stood for his whole life. He wondered if anyone would ever believe him.

He wondered if he believed it himself.

The Kill/10:02 A. M. , May 31st, 1985

Bill and Richie saw It turn toward them, Its mandibles opening and closing, Its one good eye glaring down at them, and Bill realized It gave off Its own

source of illumination, like some grisly lightning-bug. But the light was flickering and uncertain; It was badly hurt. Its thoughts buzzed and racketed

(let me go! let me go and you can have everything you’ve ever wanted— money, fame, fortune, power—I can give you these things) in his head.

Bill moved forward empty-handed, his eyes fixed on Its single red one.

He felt the power growing inside him, investing him, knotting his arms into cords, filling each clenched fist with its own force. Richie walked beside him, his lips pulled back over his teeth.

(I can give you your wife back—I can do it, only I—she’ll remember nothing as the seven of you remembered nothing)

They were close, very close now. Bill could smell Its stinking aroma and realized with sudden horror that it was the smell of the Barrens, the smell they had taken for the smell of sewers and polluted streams and the burning dump . . . but had they ever really believed those were all it had been? It

was the smell of It, and perhaps it had been strongest in the Barrens but it had hung over all Derry like a cloud and people just didn’t smell it, the way zookeepers don’t smell their charges after awhile, or even wonder why the visitors wrinkle their noses when they come in.

“Us two, ” he muttered to Richie, and Richie nodded without taking his eyes off the Spider, which now shrank back from them, Its abominable spiny legs clittering, brought to bay at last.

(I can’t give you eternal life but I can touch you and you will live long long lives—two hundred years, three hundred, perhaps five hundred—I can make you gods of the Earth—if you let me go if you let me go if you let me

—)

“Bill? ” Richie asked hoarsely.

With a scream building in him, building up and up and up, Bill charged. Richie ran with him stride for stride. They struck together with their right fists, but Bill understood it was not really their fists they were striking with at all; it was their combined force, augmented by the force of that Other; it was the force of memory and desire; above all else, it was the force of love and unforgotten childhood like one big wheel.

The Spider’s shriek filled Bill’s head, seeming to splinter his brains. He felt his fist plunge deep into writhing wetness. His arm followed it in up to the shoulder. He pulled it back, dripping with the Spider’s black blood.

Ichor poured from the hole he had made.

He saw Richie standing almost beneath Its bloated body, covered with Its darkly sparkling blood, standing in the classic boxer’s stance, his dripping

fists pumping.

The Spider lashed at them with Its legs. Bill felt one of them rip down his side, parting his shirt, parting skin. Its stinger pumped uselessly against the floor. Its screams were clarion-bells in his head. It lunged clumsily forward, trying to bite him, and instead of retreating Bill drove forward, using not just his fist now but his whole body, making himself into a torpedo. He ran into Its gut like a sprinting fullback who lowers his shoulders and simply

drives straight ahead.

For a moment he felt Its stinking flesh simply give, as if it would rebound and send him flying. With an inarticulate scream he drove harder, pushing forward and upward with his legs, digging at It with his hands. And he

broke through; was inundated with Its hot fluids. They ran across his face, in his ears. He snuffled them up his nose in thin squirming streams.

He was in the black again, up to his shoulders inside Its convulsing body.

And in his clogged ears he could hear a sound like the steady whack-

WHACK-whack-WHACK of a big bass drum, the one that leads the parade when the circus comes to town with its complement of freaks and strutting capering clowns.

The sound of Its heart.

He heard Richie scream in sudden pain, a sound that rose into a quick, gasping moan and was cut off. Bill suddenly thrust both fisted hands forward. He was choking, strangling in Its pulsing bag of guts and waters.

Whack-WHACK-whack-WHACK—

He plunged his hands into It, ripping, tearing, parting, seeking the source of the sound; rupturing organs, his slimed fingers opening and closing, his locked chest seeming to swell from lack of air.

Whack-WHACK-whack-WHACK—

And suddenly it was in his hands, a great living thing that pumped and pulsed against his palms, pushing them back and forth.

(NONONONONONONO)

Yes! Bill cried, choking, drowning. Yes! Try this, you bitch! TRY THIS ONE OUT! DO YOU LIKE IT? DO YOU LOVE IT? DO YOU?

He laced his fingers together over the pulsing narthex of Its heart, palms spread apart in an inverted V—and brought them together with all the force

he could muster.

There was one final shriek of pain and fear as Its heart exploded between his hands, running out between his fingers in jittering strings.

Whack-WHACK-whack-WHA

The scream, fading, dwindling. Bill felt Its body clench around him suddenly, like a fist in a slick glove. Then everything loosened. He became aware that Its body was tilting, slipping slowly off to one side. At the same time he began pulling back, his consciousness leaving him.

The Spider collapsed on Its side, a huge bundle of steaming alien meat, Its legs still quivering and jerking, caressing the sides of the tunnel and scraping across the floor in random scrawls.

Bill staggered away, breathing in whooping gasps, spitting in an effort to clear his mouth of Its horrible taste. He tripped over his own feet and fell to his knees.

And clearly, he heard the Voice of the Other; the Turtle might be dead, but whatever had invested it was not.

“Son, you did real good. ”

Then it was gone. The power went with it. He felt weak, revulsed, half- insane. He looked over his shoulder and saw the dying black nightmare of the Spider, still jerking and quivering.

“Richie!” He cried out in a hoarse, breaking voice. “Richie, where are you, man? ”

No answer.

The light was gone now. It had died with the Spider. He fumbled in the pocket of his matted shirt for the last book of matches. They were there, but they wouldn’t light; the heads were soaked with blood.

“Richie!” he screamed again, beginning to weep now. He began to crawl forward, first one hand and then the other groping in the dark. At last one of them struck something which yielded limply to his touch. His hands flew over it . . . and stopped as they touched Richie’s face.

“Richie! Richie!”

Still no answer. Struggling in the dark, Bill got one arm under Richie’s back and the other under his knees. He wobbled to his feet and began to stumble back the way they had come with Richie in his arms.

Derry/10:00-10:15 A. M.

At 10:00 the steady vibration which had been running through Derry’s downtown streets increased to a rumbling roar. The Derry News would later write that the supports of the Canal’s underground portion, weakened by the savage assault of what amounted to a flash flood, simply collapsed. There were, however, people who disagreed with that view. “I was there, I know, ” Harold Gardener later told his wife. “It wasn’t just that the Canal’s supports collapsed. It was an earthquake, that’s what it was. It was a fucking earthquake. ”

Either way, the results were the same. As the rumbling built steadily up and up, windows began to shatter, plaster ceilings began to fall, and the inhuman cry of twisting beams and foundations swelled into a frightening chorus. Cracks raced up the bullet-pocked brick façade of Machen’s like grasping hands. The cables holding the marquee of the Aladdin Theater out over the street snapped and the marquee came crashing down. Richard’s Alley, which ran behind the Center Street Drug, suddenly filled up with an avalanche of yellow brick as the Brian X Dowd Professional Building, erected in 1952, came crashing down. A huge screen of jaundice-colored dust rose in the air and was snatched away like a veil.

At the same time the statue of Paul Bunyan in front of the City Center exploded. It was as if that long-ago art teacher’s threat to blow it up had finally proved to be dead serious after all. The bearded grinning head rose straight up in the air. One leg kicked forward, the other back, as if Paul had attempted some sort of a split so enthusiastic it had resulted in dismemberment. The statue’s midsection blew out in a cloud of shrapnel and the head of the plastic axe rose into the rainy sky, disappeared, and then came down again, twirling end over end. It sheared through the roof of the Kissing Bridge, and then its floor.

And then, at 10:02 A. M. , downtown Derry simply collapsed.

Most of the water from the ruptured Standpipe had crossed Kansas Street and ended up in the Barrens, but tons of it rushed down into the business

district by way of Up-Mile Hill. Perhaps that was the straw that broke the camel’s back . . . or perhaps, as Harold Gardener told his wife, there really was an earthquake. Cracks raced across the surface of Main Street. They

were narrow at first. . . and then they began to gape like hungry mouths and the sound of the Canal floated up, not muffled now but frighteningly loud. Everything began to shake. The neon sign proclaiming OUTLET MOCCASINS in front of Shorty Squires’s souvenir shop hit the street and shorted out in three feet of water. A moment or two later, Shorty’s building, which stood next to Mr. Paperback, began to descend. Buddy Angstrom

was the first to see this phenomenon. He elbowed Alfred Zitner, who looked, gaped, and then elbowed Harold Gardener. Within a space of

seconds the sandbagging operation stopped. The men lining both sides of

the Canal only stood and stared toward downtown in the pouring rain, their faces stamped with identical expressions of horrified wonder. Squires’s

Souvenirs and Sundries appeared to have been built on some huge elevator which was now on the way down. It sank into the apparently solid concrete with ponderous stately dignity. When it came to a stop, you could have dropped to your hands and knees on the flooded sidewalk and entered through one of the third-floor windows. Water sprayed up all around the building, and a moment later Shorty himself appeared on the roof, waving his arms madly for rescue. Then he was obliterated as the office-building next door, the one which housed Mr. Paperback at ground level, also sank

into the ground. Unfortunately, this one did not go straight down as Shorty’s building had done; the Mr. Paperback building developed a marked lean (for a moment, in fact, it bore a strong resemblance to that fucked-up tower in Pisa, the one on the macaroni boxes). As it tilted, bricks began to shower from its top and sides. Shorty was struck by several. Harold Gardener saw him reel backward, hands to his head. . . and then the top three floors of the Mr. Paperback building slid off as neatly as pancakes from the top of a stack. Shorty disappeared. Someone on the sandbag line screamed, and then everything was lost in the grinding roar of destruction. Men were knocked off their feet or sent wobbling and staggering back from the Canal. Harold Gardener saw the buildings which faced each other across Main Street lean forward, like ladies kibbitzing over a card-game, their heads almost touching. The street itself was sinking, cracking, breaking up. Water splashed and sprayed. And then, one after another, buildings on both sides

of the street simply swayed past their centers of gravity and crashed into the street—the Northeast Bank, The Shoeboat, Alvey’s Smokes ’n Jokes,

Bailley’s Lunch, Bandler’s Record and Music Barn. Except that by then

there was really no street for them to crash into. The street had fallen into the Canal, stretching like taffy at first and then breaking up into bobbing chunks of asphalt. Harold saw the traffic-island at the three-street intersection suddenly drop out of sight, and as water geysered up, he suddenly understood what was going to happen.

“Gotta get out of here!” he screamed at Al Zitner. “It’s gonna backwater! Al! It’s gonna backwater!”

Al Zitner gave no sign that he had heard. His was the face of a sleepwalker, or perhaps of a man who has been deeply hypnotized. He stood in his soaked red-and-blue-checked sportcoat, in his open-collared

Lacoste shirt with the little alligator on the left boob, in his blue socks with the crossed white golf-clubs knitted into their sides, in his brown L. L. Bean’s boat shoes with the rubber soles. He was watching perhaps a million dollars of his own personal investments sinking into the street, three or four millions of his friends’ investments—the guys he played poker with, the

guys he golfed with, the guys he skied with at his time-sharing condo in Rangely. Suddenly his home town, Derry, Maine, for Christ’s sake, looked bizarrely like that fucked-up city where the wogs pushed people around in those long skinny canoes. Water roiled and boiled between the buildings that were still standing. Canal Street ended in a jagged black diving board over the edge of a churning lake. It was really no wonder Zitner hadn’t heard Harold. Others, however, had come to the same conclusion Gardener had come to—you couldn’t drop that much shit into a raging body of water without causing a lot of trouble. Some dropped the sandbags they had been holding and took to their heels. Harold Gardener was one of these, and so he lived. Others were not so lucky and were still somewhere in the general area as the Canal, its throat now choked with tons of asphalt, concrete, brick, plaster, glass, and about four million dollars’ worth of assorted merchandise, backsurged and poured over its concrete sleeve, carrying away men and sandbags impartially. Harold kept thinking it meant to have him; no matter how fast he ran the water kept gaining. He finally escaped by clawing his way up a steep embankment covered with shrubbery. He

looked back once and saw a man he believed to be Roger Lernerd, the head

loan officer at Harold’s credit union, trying to start his car in the parking-lot of the Canal Mini-Mall. Even over the roar of the water and the bellowing wind, Harold could hear the K-car’s little sewing-machine engine cranking and cranking and cranking as smooth black water ran rocker-panel high on both sides of it. Then, with a deep thundering cry, the Kenduskeag poured out of its banks and swept both the Canal Mini-Mall and Roger Lernerd’s bright red K-car away. Harold began climbing again, grabbing onto branches, roots, anything that looked solid enough to take his weight.

Higher ground, that was the ticket. As Andrew Keene might have said, Harold Gardener was really into the concept of higher ground that morning. Behind him he could hear downtown Derry continuing to collapse. The sound was like artillery fire.

Bill

“Beverly!” he shouted. His back and arms were one solid throbbing ache. Richie now seemed to weigh at least five hundred pounds. Put him down, then, his mind whispered. He’s dead, you know damn well he is, so why don’t you just put him down?

But he wouldn‘t, couldn’t, do that.

“Beverly!” he shouted again. “Ben! Anyone!”

He thought: This is where It threw me—and Richie—except It threw us farther—so much farther. What was that like? I’m losing it, forgetting . . .

“Bill? ” It was Ben’s voice, shaky and exhausted, somewhere fairly close. “Where are you? ”

“Over here, man. I’ve got Richie. He got. . . he’s hurt. ” “Keep talking. ” Ben was closer now. “Keep talking, Bill. ”

“We killed It, ” Bill said, walking toward where Ben’s voice had come from. “We killed the bitch. And if Richie’s dead—”

“Dead? ” Ben called, alarmed. He was very close now. . . and then his hand groped out of the dark and pawed lightly at Bill’s nose. “What do you

mean, dead? ”

“I . . . he . . . ” They were supporting Richie together now. “I can’t see him, ” Bill said. “That’s the thing. I cuh-cuh-han’ t suh-suh-see him!”

“Richie!” Ben shouted, and shook him. “Richie, come on! Come on, goddammit!” Ben’s voice was blurring now, becoming shaky. “RICHIE WILL YOU WAKE THE FUCK UP? ”

And in the dark, Richie said in a sleepy, irritable, just-coming-out-of-it voice: “All rye, Haystack. All rye. We doan need no stinkin batches. ”

“Richie!” Bill screamed. “Richie, are you all right? ”

“Bitch threw me, ” Richie muttered in that same tired, just-coming-out- of-sleep voice. “I hit something hard. That’s all all I remember. Where’s

Bevvie? ”

“Back this way, ” Ben said. Quickly, he told them about the eggs. “I stamped over a hundred. I think I got all of them. ”

“I pray to God you did, ” Richie said. He was starting to sound better. “Put me down, Big Bill. I can walk. Is the water louder? ”

“Yes, ” Bill said. The three of them were holding hands in the dark. “How’s your head? ”

“Hurts like hell. What happened after I got knocked out? ” Bill told them as much as he could bring himself to tell. “And It’s dead, ” Richie marvelled. “Are you sure, Bill? ” “Yes, ” Bill said. “This time I’m really shuh-hure. ”

“Thank God, ” Richie said. “Hold onto me, Bill, I gotta barf. ”

Bill did, and when Richie was done they walked on. Every now and then his foot struck something brittle that rolled off into the darkness. Parts of

the Spider’s eggs that Ben had tromped to pieces, he supposed, and shivered. It was good to know they were going in the right direction, but he was still glad he couldn’t see the remains.

“Beverly!” Ben shouted. “Beverly!” “Here—”

Her cry was faint, almost lost in the steady rumble of the water. They moved forward in the dark, calling to her steadily, zeroing in.

When they finally reached her, Bill asked if she had any matches left. She put half a pack in his hand. He lit one and saw their faces spring into ghostly being—Ben with his arm around Richie, who was standing slumped, blood running from his right temple, Beverly with Eddie’s head in

her lap. Then he turned the other way. Audra was lying crumpled on the flagstones, her legs asprawl, her head turned away. The webbing had mostly melted off her.

The match burned his fingers and he let it drop. In the darkness he misjudged the distance, tripped over her, and nearly went sprawling.

“Audra! Audra, can you h-h-hear m-me? ”

He got an arm under her back and sat her up. He slipped a hand under the sheaf of her hair and pressed his fingers against the side of her neck. Her

pulse was there: a slow, steady beat.

He lit another match, and as it flared he saw her pupils contract. But that was an involuntary function; the fix of her gaze did not change, even when he brought the match close enough to her face to redden her skin. She was alive, but unresponsive. Hell, it was worse than that and he knew it. She

was catatonic.

The second match burned his fingers. He shook it out.

“Bill, I don’t like the sound of that water, ” Ben said. “I think we ought to get out of here. ”

“How will we do it without Eddie? ” Richie murmured.

“We can do it, ” Bev said. “Bill, Ben’s right. We have to get out. ” “I’m taking her. ”

“Of course. But we ought to go now. ” “Which way? ”

“You’ll know, ” Beverly said softly. “You killed It. You’ll know, Bill. ”

He picked Audra up as he had picked Richie up and went back to the others. The feel of her in his arms was disquieting, creepy; she was like a breathing waxwork.

“Which way, Bill? ” Ben asked. “I d-d-don’t—”

(you’ll know, you killed It and you’ll know)

“Well, c-come on, ” Bill said. “Let’s see if we can’t find out. Beverly, gruh-gruh-hab these. ” He handed her the matches.

“What about Eddie? ” she asked. “We have to take him out. ”

“How c-can w-we? ” Bill asked. “It’s. . . B-Beverly, the pluh-hace is f- falling apart. ”

“We gotta get him out of here, man, ” Richie said. “Come on, Ben. ”

Between them they managed to hoist up Eddie’s body. Beverly lit them back to the fairytale door. Bill took Audra through it, holding her up from the floor as best he could. Richie and Ben carried Eddie through.

“Put him down, ” Beverly said. “He can stay here. ”

“It’s too dark, ” Richie sobbed. “You know. . . it’s too dark. Eds . . . he . .

. ”

“No, it’s okay, ” Ben said. “Maybe this is where he’s supposed to be. I

think maybe it is. ”

They put him down, and Richie kissed Eddie’s cheek. Then he looked blindly up at Ben. “You sure? ”

“Yeah. Come on, Richie. ”

Richie got up and turned toward the door. “Fuck you, Bitch!” he cried suddenly, and kicked the door shut with his foot. It made a solid chukking sound as it closed and latched.

“Why’d you do that? ” Beverly asked.

“I don’t know, ” Richie said, but he knew well enough. He looked back over his shoulder just as the match Beverly was holding went out.

“Bill—the mark on the door? ” “What about it? ” Bill panted. Richie said: “It’s gone. ”

Derry/10:30 A. M.

The glass corridor connecting the adult library to the Children’s Library suddenly exploded in a single brilliant flare of light. Glass flew out in an umbrella shape, whickering through the straining, whipping trees which

dotted the library grounds. Someone could have been severely hurt or even killed by such a deadly fusillade, but there was no one there, either inside or out. The library had not been opened that day at all. The tunnel which had so fascinated Ben Hanscom as a boy would never be replaced; there had been so much costly destruction in Derry that it seemed simpler to leave the

two libraries as separate unconnected buildings. In time, no one on the Derry City Council could even remember what that glass umbilicus had been for. Perhaps only Ben himself could really have told them how it was to stand outside in the still cold of a January night, your nose running, the tips of your fingers numb inside your mittens, watching the people pass back and forth inside, walking through winter with their coats off and surrounded by light. He could have told them. . . but maybe it wasn’t the sort of thing you could have gotten up and testified about at a City Council meeting—how you stood out in the cold dark and learned to love the light.

All of that’s as may be; the facts were just these: the glass corridor blew up for no apparent reason, no one was hurt (which was a blessing, since the final toll taken by that morning’s storm—in human terms, at least—was sixty-seven killed and better than three hundred and twenty injured), and it was never rebuilt. After May 31st of 1985, if you wanted to get from the Children’s Library to the adult library, you had to walk outside to do it. And if it was cold, or raining, or snowing, you had to put on your coat.

Out/10:54A. M. , May 31st, 1985

“Wait, ” Bill gasped. “Give me a chance. . . rest. ”

“Let me help you with her, ” Richie said again. They had left Eddie back in the Spider’s lair, and that was something none of them wanted to talk about. But Eddie was dead and Audra was still alive—at least, technically.

“I’ll do it, ” Bill said between choked gasps for air.

“Bullshit. You’ll give yourself a fucking heart attack. Let me help you, Big Bill. ”

“How’s your h-h-head? ”

“Hurts, ” Richie said. “Don’t change the subject. ”

Reluctantly, Bill let Richie take her. It could have been worse; Audra was a tall girl whose normal weight was one hundred and forty pounds. But the part she’d been scheduled to play in Attic Room was that of a young woman

being held hostage by a borderline psychotic who fancied himself a political terrorist. Because Freddie Firestone had wanted to shoot all of the attic

sequences first, Audra had gone on a strict poultry-cottage-cheese-tuna-fish diet and lost twenty pounds. Still, after stumble-staggering along with her in the dark for a quarter of a mile (or a half, or three-quarters of a mile, or who knew), that one hundred and twenty felt more like two hundred.

“Th-Thanks, m-m-man, ” he said.

“Don’t mention it. Your turn next, Haystack. ”

“Beep-beep, Richie, ” Ben said, and Bill grinned in spite of himself. It was a tired grin, and it didn’t last long, but a little was better than none.

“Which way, Bill? ” Beverly asked. “That water sounds louder than ever.

I don’t really fancy drowning down here. ”

“Straight ahead, then left, ” Bill said. “Maybe we better try to go a little faster. ”

They went on for half an hour, Bill calling the lefts and rights. The sound of the water continued to swell until it seemed to surround them, a scary Dolby stereo effect in the dark. Bill felt his way around a corner, one hand trailing over damp brick, and suddenly water was running over his shoes.

The current was shallow and fast.

“Give me Audra, ” he said to Ben, who was panting loudly. “Upstream

now. ” Ben passed her carefully back to Bill, who managed to sling her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. If she’d only protest. . . move. . . do something. “How’s matches, Bev? ”

“Not many. Half a dozen, maybe. Bill . . . do you know where you’re going? ”

“I think I d-d-do, ” he said. “Come on. ”

They followed him around the corner. The water foamed about Bill’s ankles, then it was up to his shins, and then it was thigh-deep. The thunder of the water had deepened to a steady bass roar. The tunnel they were in

was shaking steadily. For awhile Bill thought the current was going to

become too strong to walk against, but then they passed a feeder-pipe that was pouring a huge jet of water into their tunnel—he marvelled at the

white-water force of it—and the current slacked off somewhat, although the water continued to deepen. It—

I saw the water coming out of that feeder-pipe! Saw it!

“H-H-Hey!” he shouted. “Can y-y-you guys see a-anything? ”

“It’s been getting lighter for the last fifteen minutes or so!” Beverly shouted back. “Where are we, Bill? Do you know? ”

I thought I did, Bill almost said. “No! Come on!”

He had believed they must be approaching the concrete-channelled section of the Kenduskeag that was called the Canal . . . the part that went under downtown and came out in Bassey Park. But there was light down here, light, and surely there could be no light in the Canal under the city. But it brightened steadily just the same.

Bill was beginning to have serious problems with Audra. It wasn’t the current—that had slackened—it was the depth. Pretty soon I’ll be floating her, he thought. He could see Ben on his left and Beverly on his right; by turning his head slightly, he could see Richie behind Ben. The footing was getting decidedly odd. The bottom of the tunnel was now heaped and mounded with detritus—bricks, it felt like. And up ahead, something was sticking out of the water like the prow of a ship that is in the process of sinking.

Ben floundered toward it, shivering in the cold water. A soggy cigar box floated into his face. He pushed it aside and grabbed at the thing sticking out of the water. His eyes widened. It appeared to be a large sign. He was able to read the letters AL, and below that, FUT. And suddenly he knew.

“Bill! Richie! Bev!” He was laughing with astonishment. “What is it, Ben? ” Beverly shouted.

Grabbing it with both hands, Ben rocked it back. There was a grating sound as one side of the sign scraped along the wall of the tunnel. Now they could read: ALADDI, and, below that, BACK TO THE FUTURE.

“It’s the marquee for the Aladdin, ” Richie said. “How—”

“The street caved in, ” Bill whispered. His eyes were widening. He stared up the tunnel. The light was brighter still up ahead.

“What, Bill? ”

“What the fuck happened? ” “Bill? Bill? What—”

“All these drains!” Bill said wildly. “All these old drains! There’s been another flood! And I think this time—”

He began to flounder ahead again, holding Audra up. Ben, Bev, and

Richie fell in behind him. Five minutes later Bill looked up and saw blue sky. He was looking through a crack in the ceiling of the tunnel, a crack that

widened to better than seventy feet across as it ran away from where he stood. The water was broken by many islands and archipelagos up ahead— piles of bricks, the back deck of a Plymouth sedan with its trunk sprung open and pouring water, a parking-meter leaning against the tunnel wall at a drunken slant, its red VIOLATION flag up.

The footing had become almost impossible now—mini-mountains that rose and fell with no rhyme or reason, inviting a broken ankle. The water ran mildly around their armpits.

Mild now, Bill thought. But if we’d been here two hours ago, even one, I think we might have gotten the ride of our lives.

“What the fuck is this, Big Bill? ” Richie asked. He was standing at Bill’s left elbow, his face soft with wonder as he looked up at the rip in the roof of the tunnel—except it’s not the roof of any tunnel, Bill thought. It’s Main

Street. At least it used to be.

“I think most of downtown Derry is now in the Canal and being carried down the Kenduskeag River. Pretty soon it’ll be in the Penobscot and then it will be in the Atlantic Ocean and good fucking riddance. Can you help me with Audra, Richie? I don’t think I can—”

“Sure, ” Richie said. “Sure, Bill. No sweat. ”

He took Audra from Bill. In this light, Bill could see her better than he

perhaps wanted to—her pallor masked but not hidden by the dirt and ordure that smeared her forehead and caked her cheeks. Her eyes were still wide open. . . wide open and innocent of all sense. Her hair hung lank and wet.

She might as well have been one of those inflatable dollies they sold at the Pleasure Chest in New York or along the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. The only difference was her slow, steady respiration. . . and that might have been a clockwork trick, no more than that.

“How are we going to get up from here? ” he asked Richie.

“Get Ben to give you ten fingers, ” Richie said. “You can yank Bev up, and the two of you can get your wife. Ben can boost me and we’ll get Ben. And after that I’ll show you how to set up a volleyball tournament for a thousand sorority girls. ”

“Beep-beep, Richie. ”

“Beep-beep your ass, Big Bill. ”

The tiredness was going through him in steady waves. He caught Beverly’s level gaze and held it for a moment. She nodded to him slightly,

and he made a smile for her.

“Give me ten fingers, B-B-Ben? ”

Ben, who also looked unutterably weary, nodded. A deep scratch ran down one cheek. “I think I can handle that. ”

He stooped slightly and laced his hands together. Bill hiked one foot, stepped into Ben’s hand, and jumped up. It wasn’t quite enough. Ben lifted the step he had made with his hands and Bill grabbed the edge of the broken-in tunnel roof. He yanked himself up. The first thing he saw was a white-and-orange crash barrier. The second thing was a crowd of milling men and women beyond the barrier. The third was Freese’s Department Store—only it had an oddly bulged-out, foreshortened look. It took him a moment to realize that almost half of Freese’s had sunk into the street and the Canal beneath. The top half had slued out over the street and seemed in danger of toppling over like a pile of badly stacked books.

“Look! Look! There’s someone in the street!”

A woman was pointing toward the place where Bill’s head had poked out of the crevasse in the shattered pavement.

“Praise God, there’s someone else!”

She started forward, an elderly woman with a kerchief tied over her head peasant-style. A cop held her back. “Not safe out there, Mrs. Nelson. You

know it. Rest of the street might go any time. ”

Mrs. Nelson, Bill thought. I remember you. Your sister used to sit George and me sometimes. He raised his hand to show her he was all right, and when she raised her own hand in return, he felt a sudden surge of good feelings—and hope.

He turned around and lay flat on the sagging pavement, trying to

distribute his weight as evenly as possible, the way you were supposed to do on thin ice. He reached down for Bev. She grasped his wrists and, with what seemed to be the last of his strength, he pulled her up. The sun, which had disappeared again, now ran out from behind a brace of mackerel-scale clouds and gave them their shadows back. Beverly looked up, startled, caught Bill’s eyes, and smiled.

“I love you, Bill, ” she said. “And I pray she’ll be all right. ”

“Thuh-hank you, Bevvie, ” he said, and his kind smile made her start to cry a little. He hugged her and the small crowd gathered behind the crash barrier applauded. A photographer from the Derry News snapped a picture.

It appeared in the June 1st edition of the paper, which was printed in Bangor because of water damage to the News’s presses. The caption was simple enough, and true enough for Bill to cut the picture out and keep it tucked away in his wallet for years to come: SURVIVORS, the caption read. That was all, but that was enough.

It was six minutes of eleven in Derry, Maine.

Derry/Later the Same Day

The glass corridor between the Children’s Library and the adult library had exploded at 10:30 A. M. At 10:33, the rain stopped. It didn’t taper off; it stopped all at once, as if Someone Up There had flicked a toggle switch.

The wind had already begun to fall, and it fell so rapidly that people stared at each other with uneasy, superstitious faces. The sound was like the wind- down of a 747’s engines after it has been safely parked at the gate. The sun peeked out for the first time at 10:47. By midafternoon the clouds had burned away entirely, and the day had come off fair and hot. By 3:30 P. M. the mercury in the Orange Crush thermometer outside the door of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes read eighty-three—the highest reading of the young season. People walked through the streets like zombies, not talking much. Their expressions were remarkably similar: a kind of stupid wonder that would have been funny if it was not also so

frankly pitiable. By evening reporters from ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN had arrived in Derry, and the network news reporters would bring some version of the truth home to most people; they would make it real. . . although there were those who might have suggested that reality is a highly untrustworthy concept, something perhaps no more solid than a piece of canvas stretched over an interlacing of cables like the strands of a spiderweb. The following morning Bryant Gumble and Willard Scott of the Today show would be in Derry. During the course of the program, Gumble would interview Andrew Keene. “Whole Standpipe just crashed over and rolled down the hill, ”

Andrew said. “It was like wow. You know what I mean? Like Steven Spielberg eat your heart out, you know? Hey, I always got the idea looking at you on TV that you were, you know, a lot bigger. ” Seeing themselves and their neighbors on TV—that would make it real. It would give them a place from which to grasp this terrible, ungraspable thing. It had been a

FREAK STORM. In the days following, THE DEATH-COUNT would rise in THE WAKE OF THE KILLER STORM. It was, in fact, THE WORST

SPRING STORM IN MAINE HISTORY. All of these headlines, as terrible as they were, were useful—they helped to blunt the essential strangeness of what had happened. . . or perhaps strangeness was too mild a word. Insanity might have been better. Seeing themselves on TV would help make it concrete, less insane. But in the hours before the news crews arrived, there were only the people from Derry, walking through their rubble-strewn,

mud-slicked streets with expressions of stunned unbelief on their faces. Only the people from Derry, not talking much, looking at things, occasionally picking things up and then tossing them down again, trying to figure out what had happened during the last seven or eight hours. Men stood on Kansas Street, smoking, looking at houses lying upside down in

the Barrens. Other men and women stood beyond the white-and-orange crash barriers, looking into the black hole that had been downtown until ten that morning. The headline of that Sunday’s paper read: WE WILL REBUILD, VOWS DERRY MAYOR, and perhaps they would. But in the weeks that followed, while the City Council wrangled over how the rebuilding should begin, the huge crater that had been downtown continued to grow in an unspectacular but steady way. Four days after the storm, the office building of the Bangor Hydroelectric Company collapsed into the hole. Three days after that, the Flying Doghouse, which sold the best kraut- and chili-dogs in eastern Maine, fell in. Drains backed up periodically in houses, apartment buildings, and businesses. It got so bad in the Old Cape that people began to leave. June 10th was the first evening of horse-racing at Bassey Park; the first pace was scheduled for 8:00 P. M. and that seemed to cheer everyone up. But a section of bleachers collapsed as the trotters in the first race turned into the home stretch, and half a dozen people were hurt. One of them was Foxy Foxworth, who had managed the Aladdin Theater until 1973. Foxy spent two weeks in the hospital, suffering from a

broken leg and a punctured testicle. When he was released, he decided to go to his sister’s in Somersworth, New Hampshire.

He wasn’t the only one. Derry was falling apart.

They watched the orderly slam the back doors of the ambulance and go around to the passenger seat. The ambulance started up the hill toward the Derry Home Hospital. Richie had flagged it down at severe risk of life and limb, and had argued the irate driver to a draw when the driver insisted he just didn’t have any more room. He had ended up stretching Audra out on the floor.

“Now what? ” Ben asked. There were huge brown circles under his eyes and a grimy ring of dirt around his neck.

“I’m g-going back to the Town House, ” Bill said. “G-Gonna sleep for about suh-hixteen hours. ”

“I second that, ” Richie said. He looked hopefully at Bev. “Got any cigarettes, purty lady? ”

“No, ” Beverly said. “I think I’m going to quit again. ” “Sensible enough idea. ”

They began to walk slowly up the hill, the four of them side by side. “It’s o-o-over, ” Bill said.

Ben nodded. “We did it. You did it, Big Bill. ”

“We all did it, ” Beverly said. “I wish we could have brought Eddie up. I wish that more than anything. ”

They reached the corner of Upper Main and Point Street. A kid in a red rainslicker and green rubber boots was sailing a paper boat along the brisk run of water in the gutter. He looked up, saw them looking at him, and waved tentatively. Bill thought it was the boy with the skateboard—the one whose friend had seen Jaws in the Canal. He smiled and stepped toward the boy.

“It’s all right n-n-now, ” he said.

The boy studied him gravely, and then grinned. The smile was sunny and hopeful. “Yeah, ” he said. “I think it is. ”

“Bet your a-a-ass. ” The kid laughed.

“You g-gonna be careful on thuh-hat skateboard? ”

“Not really, ” the kid said, and this time Bill laughed. He restrained an urge to ruffle the kid’s hair—that probably would have been resented—and returned to the others.

“Who was that? ” Richie asked.

“A friend, ” Bill said. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Do you remember it? When we came out before? ”

Beverly nodded. “Eddie got us back to the Barrens. Only we ended up on the other side of the Kenduskeag somehow. The Old Cape side. ”

“You and Haystack pushed the lid off one of those pumping-stations, ” Richie said to Bill, “because you had the most weight. ”

“Yeah, ” Ben said. “We did. The sun was out, but it was almost down. ” “Yeah, ” Bill said. “And we were all there. ”

“But nothing lasts forever, ” Richie said. He looked back down the hill they had just climbed and sighed. “Look at this, for instance. ”

He held his hands out The tiny scars in the palms were gone. Beverly put her hands out; Ben did the same; Bill added his. All were dirty but unmarked.

“Nothing lasts forever, ” Richie repeated. He looked up at Bill, and Bill saw tears cut slowly through the dirt on Richie’s cheeks.

“Except maybe for love, ” Ben said. “And desire, ” Beverly said.

“How about friends? ” Bill asked, and smiled. “What do you think, Trashmouth? ”

“Well, ” Richie said, smiling and rubbing his eyes, “Ah got to thank about it, boy; Ah say, Ah say Ah got to thank about it. ”

Bill put his hands out and they joined theirs with his and stood there for a moment, seven who had been reduced to four but who could still make a circle. They looked at each other. Ben was crying now too, the tears spilling from his eyes. But he was smiling.

“I love you guys so much, ” he said. He squeezed Bev’s and Richie’s

hands tight-tight-tight for a moment, and then dropped them. “Now could we see if they’ve got such a thing as breakfast in this place? And we ought to call Mike. Tell him we’re okay. ”

“Good thinnin, senhorr, ” Richie said. “Every now an then I theenk you might turn out okay. Watchoo theenk, Beeg Beel? ”

“I theenk you ought to go fuck yourself, ” Bill said.

They walked into the Town House on a wave of laughter, and as Bill pushed through the glass door, Beverly caught sight of something which she never spoke of but never forgot. For just a moment she saw their reflections in the glass—only there were six, not four, because Eddie was behind

Richie and Stan was behind Bill, that little half-smile on his face.

Out/Dusk, August 10th 1958

The sun sits neatly on the horizon, a slightly oblate red ball that throws a flat feverish light over the Barrens. The iron cover on top of one of the

pumping-stations rises a little, settles, rises again, and begins to slide. “P-P-Push it, Buh-Ben, it’s bruh-breaking my shoulder—”

The cover slides farther, tilts, and falls into the shrubbery that has grown up around the concrete cylinder. Seven children come out one by one and

look around, blinking owlishly in silent wonder. They are like children who have never seen daylight before.

“It’s so quiet, ” Beverly says softly.

The only sounds are the loud rush of water and the somnolent hum of insects. The storm is over but the Kenduskeag is still very high. Closer to town, not far from the place where the river is corseted in concrete and called a canal, it has overflowed its banks, although the flooding is by no means serious—a few wet cellars is the worst of it. This time.

Stan moves away from them, his face blank and thoughtful. Bill looks

around and at first he thinks Stan has seen a small fire on the riverbank-fire is his first impression: a red glow almost too bright to look at. But when Stan picks the fire up in his right hand the angle of the light changes, and Bill sees it’s nothing but a Coke bottle, one of the new clear ones, which

someone has dropped by the river. He watches as Stan reverses it, holds it

by the neck, and brings it down on a shelf of rock jutting out of the bank. The bottle breaks, and Bill is aware they are all watching Stan now as he pokes through the shattered remains of the bottle, his face sober and

studious and absorbed. At last he picks up a narrow wedge of glass. The westering sun throws red glints from it, and Bill thinks again: Like a fire.

Stan looks up at him and Bill suddenly understands: it is perfectly clear to him, and perfectly right. He steps forward toward Stan with his hands held out, palms up. Stan backs away, into the water. Small black bugs stitch along just above the surface, and Bill can see an iridescent dragonfly go buzzing off into the reeds along the far bank like a small flying rainbow. A

frog begins a steady bass thud, and as Stan takes his left hand and draws

the edge of glass down his palm, peeling skin and bringing thin blood, Bill thinks in a kind of ecstasy: There’s so much life down here!

“Bill? ”

“Sure. Both. ”

Stan cuts his other hand. There is pain, but not much. A whippoorwill has begun to call somewhere, a cool sound, peaceful. Bill thinks: That whippoorwill is raising the moon.

He looks at his hands, both of them bleeding now, and then around him.

The others are there—Eddie with his aspirator clutched tightly in one hand; Ben with his big belly pushing palely out through the tattered remains of his shirt; Richie, his face oddly naked without his glasses; Mike, silent and solemn, his normally full lips compressed to a thin line. And Beverly, her head up, her eyes wide and clear, her hair still somehow lovely in spite of

the dirt that mats it.

All of us. All of us are here.

And he sees them, really sees them, for the last time, because in some

way he understands that they will never all be together again, the seven of them—not this way. No one talks. Beverly holds out her hands, and after a moment Richie and Ben hold out theirs. Mike and Eddie do the same. Stan cuts them one by one as the sun begins to slip behind the horizon, cooling that red furnace-glow to a dusky rose-pink. The whippoorwill cries again, Bill can see the first faint swirls of mist on the water, and he feels as if he has become a part of everything—this is a brief ecstasy which he will no more talk about than Beverly will later talk about the brief reflection she

sees of two dead men who were, as boys, her friends.

A breeze touches the trees and bushes, making them sigh, and he thinks: This is a lovely place, and I’ll never forget it. It’s lovely, and they are lovely; each one of them is gorgeous. The whippoorwill cries again, sweet and liquid, and for a moment Bill feels at one with it, as if he could sing and then be gone into the dusk—as if he could fly away, brave in the air.

He looks at Beverly and she is smiling at him. She closes her eyes and

holds her hands out to either side. Bill takes her left; Ben her right. Bill can feel the warmth of her blood mixing with his own. The others join in and

they stand in a circle, all of their hands now sealed in that peculiarly intimate way.

Stan is looking at Bill with a kind of urgency; a kind of fear.

“Swuh-Swear to muh-me that you’ll c-c-c-come buh-back, ” Bill says. “Swear to me that if Ih-Ih-It isn’t d-d-dead, you’ll cuh-home back. ”

“Swear, ” Ben said. “Swear. ” Richie. “Yes—I swear. ” Bev.

“Swear it, ” Mike Hanlon mutters.

“Yeah. Swear. ” Eddie, his voice a thin and reedy whisper.

“I swear too, ” Stan whispers, but his voice falters and he looks down as he speaks.

“I-I swuh-swuh-swear. ”

That was it; that was all. But they stand there for awhile longer, feeling the power that is in their circle, the closed body that they make. The light paints their faces in pale fading colors; the sun is now gone and sunset is dying. They stand together in a circle as the darkness creeps down into the Barrens, filling up the paths they have walked this summer, the clearings

where they have played tag and guns, the secret places along the riverbanks where they have sat and discussed childhood’s long questions or smoked Beverly’s cigarettes or where they have merely been silent, watching the

passage of the clouds reflected in the water. The eye of the day is closing.

At last Ben drops his hands. He starts to say something, shakes his head, and walks away. Richie follows him, then Beverly and Mike, walking

together. No one talks; they climb the embankment to Kansas Street and

simply take leave of one another. And when Bill thinks it over twenty-seven years later, he realizes that they really never did all get together again.

Four of them quite often, sometimes five, and maybe six once or twice. But never all seven.

He’s the last to go. He stands for a long time with his hands on the

rickety white fence, looking down into the Barrens as, overhead, the first

stars seed the summer sky. He stands under the blue and over the black and watches the Barrens fill up with darkness.

I never want to play down there again, he thinks suddenly and is amazed to find the thought is not terrible or distressing but tremendously liberating.

He stands there a moment longer and then turns away from the Barrens and starts home, walking along the dark sidewalk with his hands in his pockets, glancing from time to time at the houses of Derry, warmly lit against the night.

After a block or two he begins to walk faster, thinking of supper. . . and a block or two after that, he begins to whistle.

‌DERRY: THE LAST INTERLUDE‌

“ ‘The ocean, in these times, is a perfect fleet of ships; and we can hardly fail to encounter many, in running over. It is merely crossing, ’ said Mr.

Micawber, trifling with his eyeglass, ‘merely crossing. The distance is quite imaginary. ’ ”

—Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

June 4th, 1985

Bill came in about twenty minutes ago and brought me this book—Carole found it on one of the tables in the library and gave it to him when he asked for it. I thought Chief Rademacher might have taken it, but apparently he didn’t want anything to do with it.

Bill’s stutter is disappearing again, but the poor man has aged four years in the last four days. He told me he expects Audra to be discharged from Derry Home Hospital (where I myself yet tarry) tomorrow, only to take a private ambulance north to the Bangor Mental Health Institute. Physically she’s fine—minor cuts and bruises that are already healing. Mentally. . .

“You raise her hand and it stays up, ” Bill said. He was sitting by the

window, twiddling a can of diet soda between his hands. “It just floats there until someone puts it down again. Her reflexes are there, but very slow. The EEG they did shows a severely repressed alpha wave. She’s c-c-catatonic, Mike. ”

I said, “I’ve got an idea. Maybe not such a good one. If you don’t like it, just say so. ”

“What? ”

“I’m going to be in here another week, ” I said. “Instead of sending

Audra up to Bangor, why don’t you take her to my place, Bill? Spend the

week with her. Talk to her, even if she doesn’t talk back. Is she. . . is she continent? ”

“No, ” Bill said bleakly.

“Can you—I mean, would you—”

“Would I change her? ” He smiled, and it was such a painful smile that I had to look away for a moment. It was the way my father smiled the time he told me about Butch Bowers and the chickens. “Yes. I think I could do that much. ”

“I won’t tell you to take it easy on yourself when you’re obviously not prepared to do that, ” I said, “but please remember that you yourself agreed that much or all of what’s happened was almost certainly ordained. That may include Audra’s part in this.”

“I sh-should have kept my mouth shut about where I was g-going.” Sometimes it’s better to say nothing—so that’s what I did.

“All right,” he said at last. “If you really mean it—”

“I mean it. They’ve got my housekeys down at the Patient Services Desk.

There’s a couple of Delmonico steaks in the freezer. Maybe that was ordained, too.”

“She’s eating mostly soft foods and, uh, luh-liquids.”

“Well,” I said, holding onto my smile, “maybe there’ll be cause for a celebration. There’s a pretty good bottle of wine on the top shelf in the pantry, too. Mondavi. Domestic, but good.”

He came over and gripped my hand. “Thank you, Mike.” “Any time, Big Bill.”

He let go of my hand. “Richie flew back to California this morning.” I nodded. “Think you’ll stay in touch?”

“M-Maybe,” he said. “For awhile, anyway. But . . .” He looked at me levelly. “It’s going to happen again, I think.”

“The forgetting?”

“Yes. In fact, I think it’s already started. Just little things so far. Details.

But I think it’s going to spread.” “Maybe that’s best.”

“Maybe.” He looked out the window, still twiddling his can of diet soda, almost surely thinking about his wife, so wide-eyed and silent and beautiful and plastic. Catatonic. The sound of a door slamming shut and locked. He sighed.

“Maybe it is.”

“Ben? Beverly?”

He looked back at me and smiled a little. “Ben’s invited her to come back to Nebraska with him, and she’s agreed to go, at least for awhile. You know about her friend in Chicago?”

I nodded. Beverly told Ben and Ben told me yesterday. If I may

understate the case (grotesquely understate the case), Beverly’s later description of her wonderful fantastic husband, Tom, was much truer than her original one. Wonderful fantastic Tom kept Bev in emotional, spiritual, and sometimes physical bondage for the last four years or so. Wonderful

fantastic Tom got here by beating the information out of Bev’s only close woman friend.

“She told me she’s going to fly back to Chicago the week after next and file a missing-persons report on him. Tom, I mean.”

“Smart enough,” I said. “No one’s ever going to find him down there.” Or Eddie either, I thought but did not say.

“No, I suppose not,” Bill said. “And when she goes back, I’m betting Ben will go with her. And you know something else? Something really crazy?”

“What?”

“I don’t think she really remembers what happened to Tom.” I just stared at him.

“She’s forgotten or forgetting,” Bill said. “And I can’t remember what the doorway looked like anymore. The d-doorway into Its place. I try to think of it and the craziest thing happens—I get this ih-image of g-g-goats walking over a bridge. From that story ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff. ’ Crazy, huh?”

“They’ll trace Tom Rogan to Derry eventually,” I said.

“He’ll have left a paper trail a mile wide. Rent-a-car, plane tickets.” “I’m not so sure of that,” Bill said, lighting a cigarette. “I think he might

have paid cash for his plane ticket and given a phony name. Maybe bought a cheap car here or stole one.”

“Why?”

“Oh, come on,” Bill said. “Do you think he came all this way to give her a spanking?”

Our eyes met for a long moment and then he stood up. “Listen, Mike . . .” “Too hip, gotta split,” I said. “I can dig it.”

He laughed at that, laughed hard, and when he had sobered he said: “Thanks for the use of your place, Mikey.”

“I’m not going to swear to you it’ll make any difference. It has no therapeutic qualities that I’m aware of.”

“Well . . . I’ll see you.” He did an odd thing then, odd but rather lovely.

He kissed my cheek. “God bless, Mike. I’ll be around.”

“Things may be okay, Bill,” I said. “Don’t give up hope. They may be okay.”

He smiled and nodded, but I think the same word was in both of our minds: Catatonic.

June 5th, 1985

Ben and Beverly came in today to say goodbye. They’re not flying—Ben’s rented a great big Cadillac from the Hertz people and they’re going to drive, not hurrying. There’s something in their eyes when they look at each other, and I’d bet my pension-plan that if they’re not making it now, they will be by the time they get to Nebraska.

Beverly hugged me, told me to get well quickly, and then cried.

Ben also hugged me, and asked for the third or fourth time if I would write. I told him I would indeed write, and so I will . . . for awhile, at least. Because this time it’s happening to me, as well.

I’m forgetting things.

As Bill said, right now it’s only small things, details. But it feels like the sort of thing that’s going to spread. It could be that in a month or a year, this notebook will be all I’ll have to remind me of what happened here in Derry. I suppose the words themselves might begin to fade, eventually leaving this book as blank as when I first picked it up in the school-supplies department at Freese’s. That’s an awful thought and in the daytime it seems wildly paranoid. . . but, do you know, in the watches of the night it seems perfectly logical.

This forgetting. . . the prospect fills me with panic, but it also offers a sneaking sort of relief. It suggests to me more than anything else that this

time they really did kill It; that there is no need of a watchman to stand and wait for the cycle to begin again.

Dull panic, sneaking relief. It’s the relief I’ll embrace, I think, sneaking or not.

Bill called to say he and Audra had moved in. There is no change in her. “I’ll always remember you.” That’s what Beverly told me just before she

and Ben left.

I think I saw a different truth in her eyes.

June 6th, 1985

Interesting piece in the Derry News today, on page one. The story was headed: STORM CAUSES HENLEY TO GIVE UP AUDITORIUM

EXPANSION PLANS. The Henley in question is Tim Henley, a multi- millionaire developer who came into Derry like a whirlwind in the late sixties—it was Henley and Zitner who organized the consortium

responsible for building the Derry Mall (which, according to another piece on page one, is probably going to be declared a total loss). Tim Henley was determined to see Derry grow. There was a profit-motive, yes indeed, but

there was more to it than that: Henley genuinely wanted to see it happen.

His sudden abandonment of the auditorium expansion suggests several things to me. That Henley may have soured on Derry is only the most

obvious. I think it’s also possible that he’s in the process of losing his shirt because of the destruction of the mall.

But the article also suggests that Henley is not alone; that other investors and potential investors in Derry’s future may be rethinking their options. Of course, Al Zitner won’t have to bother; God retired him when downtown collapsed. Of the others, those who thought like Henley are now facing a rather difficult problem—how do you rebuild an urban area which is now at least fifty percent underwater?

I think that, after a long and ghoulishly vital existence, Derry may be dying. . . like a nightshade whose time to bloom has come and gone.

Called Bill Denbrough late this afternoon. No change in Audra.

An hour ago I put through another call, this one to Richie Tozier in California. His answering machine fielded the call, with Creedence Clearwater Revival music playing in the background. Those machines

always fuck up my timing somehow. I left my name and number, hesitated, and added that I hoped he was able to wear his contact lenses again. I was about to hang up when Richie himself picked up the phone and said, “Mikey! How you be?” His voice was pleased and warm . . . but there was an obvious bewilderment there as well. He was wearing the verbal expression of a man who has been caught utterly flat-footed.

“Hello, Richie,” I said. “I’m doing pretty well.” “Good. How much pain you having?”

“Some. It’s going away. The itch is worse. I’ll be damn glad when they finally decide to unstrap my ribs. By the way, I liked the Creedence.”

Richie laughed. “Shit, that ain’t Creedence, that’s ‘Rock and Roll Girls, ’ from Fogarty’s new album. Centerfield, it’s called. You haven’t heard any of it?”

“Huh-uh.”

“You got to get it, it’s great. It’s just like . . .” He trailed off for a moment and then said, “It’s just like the old days.”

“I’ll pick it up,” I said, and I probably will. I always liked John Fogarty. “Green River” was my all-time Creedence favorite, I guess. Get back home, he says. Just before the fade he says it.

“What about Bill?”

“He and Audra are keeping house for me while I’m in here.” “Good. That’s good.” He paused for a moment. “You want to hear

something fucking bizarre, ole Mikey?”

“Sure,” I said. I had a pretty good idea what he was going to say.

“Well . . . I was sitting here in my study, listening to some of the new

Cashbox hot prospects, going over some ad copy, reading memos. . . there’s about two mountains of stuff backed up, and I’m looking at roughly a month of twenty-five-hour days. So I had the answering machine turned on, but with the volume turned up so I could intercept the calls I wanted and just let the dimwits talk to the tape. And the reason I let you talk to the tape as long as I did—”

“—was because at first you didn’t have the slightest idea who I was.” “Jesus, that’s right! How did you know that?”

“Because we’re forgetting again. All of us this time.” “Mikey, are you sure?”

“What was Stan’s last name?” I asked him.

There was silence on the other end of the line—a long silence. In it, faintly, I could hear a woman talking in Omaha or maybe she was in

Ruthven, Arizona, or Flint, Michigan. I heard her, as faint as a space- traveller leaving the solar system in the nosecone of a burned-out rocket, thank someone for the cookies.

Then Richie said, uncertainly: “I think it was Underwood, but that isn’t Jewish, it it?”

“It was Uris.”

“Uris!” Richie cried, sounding both relieved and shaken. “Jesus, I hate it when I get something right on the tip of my tongue and can’t quite pick it off. Someone brings out a Trivial Pursuit game, I say ‘Excuse me but I think the diarrhea’s coming back so maybe I’ll just go home, okay? ’ But you remember, anyhow, Mikey. Like before.”

“No. I looked it up in my address book.”

Another long silence. Then: “You didn’t remember?” “Nope.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“Then this time it’s really over,” he said, and the relief in his voice was unmistakable.

“Yes, I think so.”

That long-distance silence fell again—all the miles between Maine and California. I believe we were both thinking the same thing: it was over, yes, and in six weeks or six months, we will have forgotten all about each other. It’s over, and all it’s cost us is our friendship and Stan and Eddie’s lives.

I’ve almost forgotten them, you know it? Horrible as it may sound, I have almost forgotten Stan and Eddie. Was it asthma Eddie had, or chronic

migraine? I’ll be damned if I can remember for sure, although I think it was migraine. I’ll ask Bill. He’ll know.

“Well, you say hi to Bill and that pretty wife of his,” Richie said with a cheeriness that sounded canned.

“I will, Richie,” I said, closing my eyes and rubbing my forehead. He remembered Bill’s wife was in Derry but not her name, or what had

happened to her.

“And if you’re ever in L. A. , you got the number. We’ll get together and mouth some chow.”

“Sure.” I felt hot tears behind my eyes. “And if you get back this way, the same thing goes.”

“Mikey?” “Right here.”

“I love you, man.” “Same here.”

“Okay. Keep your thumb on it.” “Beep-beep, Richie.”

He laughed. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stick it in your ear, Mike. Ah say, in yo

ear, boy.”

He hung up and so did I. Then I lay back on my pillows with my eyes shut and didn’t open them for a long time.

June 7th, 1985

Police Chief Andrew Rademacher, who took over from Chief Borton in the late sixties, is dead. It was a bizarre accident, one I can’t help associating with what has been happening in Derry. . . what has just ended in Derry.

The combination police-station-courthouse stands on the edge of the area that fell into the Canal, and while it didn’t go, the upheaval—or the flood— must have caused structural damage of which no one was aware.

Rademacher was working late in his office last night, the story in the paper says, as he has every night since the storm and the flood. The Police Chiefs office has moved from the third to the fifth floor since the old days, to just below an attic where all sorts of records and useless city artifacts are stored. One of those artifacts was the tramp-chair I have described earlier in these pages. It was made of iron and weighed better than four hundred pounds. The building shipped a quantity of water during the downpour of May 31st, and that must have weakened the attic floor (or so the paper says). Whatever the reason, the tramp-chair fell from the attic directly onto Chief Rademacher as he sat at his desk, reading accident reports. He was

killed instantly. Officer Bruce Andeen rushed in and found him lying on the ruins of his shattered desk, his pen still in one hand.

Talked to Bill on the phone again. Audra is taking some solid food, he says, but otherwise there is no change. I asked him if Eddie’s big problem had been asthma or migraine.

“Asthma,” he said promptly. “Don’t you remember his aspirator?” “Sure,” I said, and did. But only when Bill mentioned it.

“Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“What was his last name?”

I looked at my address book lying on the nighttable, but didn’t pick it up. “I don’t quite remember.”

“It was like Kerkorian,” Bill said, sounding distressed, “but that wasn’t quite it. You’ve got everything written down, though. Right?”

“Right,” I said. “Thank God for that.”

“Have you had any ideas about Audra?”

“One,” he said, “but it’s so crazy I don’t want to talk about it.” “You sure?”

“Yeah.” “All right.”

“Mike, it’s scary, isn’t it? Forgetting like this?” “Yes,” I said. And it is.

June 8th, 1985

Raytheon, which had been scheduled to break ground on its Derry plant in July, has decided at the last minute to build in Waterville instead. The editorial on page one of the News expresses dismay. . . and, if I read correctly between the lines, a little fright.

I think I know what Bill’s idea is. He’ll have to act quickly, before the last of the magic departs this place. If it hasn’t already.

I guess what I thought before wasn’t so paranoid after all. The names and addresses of the others in my little book are fading. The color and quality of

the ink combine to make those entries look as if they were written fifty or seventy-five years before the others I’ve jotted in there. This has happened in the last four or five days. I’m convinced that by September their names will be utterly gone.

I suppose I could preserve them; I could just keep copying them. But I’m also convinced that each would fade in its turn, and that very soon it would become an exercise in futility—like writing I will not throw spit-balls in

class five hundred times. I would be writing names that meant nothing for a reason I didn’t remember.

Let it go, let it go.

Bill, act quickly. . . but be careful!

June 9th, 1985

Woke up in the middle of the night from a terrible nightmare I couldn’t remember, got panicky, couldn’t breathe. Reached for the call-button and then couldn’t use it. Had a terrible vision of Mark Lamonica answering the bell with a hypo . . . or Henry Bowers with his switchblade.

I grabbed my address book and called Ben Hanscom in Nebraska. . . the address and number have faded still more, but they are still legible. No go, Joe. Got a recorded phone-company voice telling me service to that number has been cancelled.

Was Ben fat, or did he have something like a club foot? Lay awake until dawn.

June 10th, 1985

They tell me I can go home tomorrow.

I called Bill and told him that—I suppose I wanted to warn him that his time is getting shorter all the time. Bill is the only one I remember clearly

and I’m convinced that I’m the only one he remembers clearly. Because we are both still here in Derry, I suppose.

“All right,” he said. “By tomorrow we’ll be out of your hair.”

“You still got your idea?”

“Yeah. Looks like it’s time to try it.” “Be careful.”

He laughed and said something I both do and don’t understand: “You can’t be c-c-careful on a skuh-hateboard, man.”

“How will I know how it turned out, Bill?” “You’ll know,” he said, and hung up.

My heart’s with you, Bill, no matter how it turns out. My heart is with all of them, and I think that, even if we forget each other, we’ll remember in our dreams.

I’m almost done with this diary now—and I suppose a diary is all that it will ever be, and that the story of Derry’s old scandals and eccentricities has no place outside these pages. That’s fine with me; I think that, when they let me out of here tomorrow, it might finally be time to start thinking about

some sort of new life . . . although just what that might be is unclear to me.

I loved you guys, you know. I loved you so much.