It

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He wasn't aware he'd reached the end of the pipe until he fell out of it and staggered forward, pinwheeling his arms in a helpless effort to keep his balance. He fell on his belly into a semi-solid mass about two feet below the mouth of the pipe he'd just tumbled out of. Something ran squeaking over his hand. He screamed and sat up, clutching his tingling hand to his chest, aware that a rat had just run over it; he had felt the loathsome, plated drag of the thing's hairless tail.
He tried to stand up and rapped his head on the new pipe's low ceiling. It was a hard hit, and Bill was driven back to his knees with large red flowers exploding in the darkness before his eyes.
"Be c-c-careful!" He heard himself shouting. His words echoed flatly. "It drops off here! Eh-Eddie! Where a-a-are yuh-you?"
"Here!" One of Eddie's waving hands brushed Bill's nose. "Help me out, Bill, I can't see! It's-"
There was a huge watery ker-whasssh! Beverly, Mike, and Richie all screamed in unison. In the daylight, the almost perfect harmony the three of them made would have been funny; down here in the dark, in the sewers, it was terrifying. Suddenly all of them were tumbling out. Bill clutched Eddie in a bear-hug, trying to save his arm.
"Oh Christ, I thought I was gonna drown," Richie moaned. "We got doused-oh boy, a shit-shower, oh great, they ought to have a class trip down here sometime, Bill, we could get Mr Carson to lead it-"
"And Miss Jimmison could give a health lecture afterward," Ben said in a trembling voice, and they all laughed shrilly. As the laughter was tapering off, Stan suddenly burst into miserable tears.
"Don't, man," Richie said, putting a fumbling arm around Stan's sticky shoulders. "You'll get us all cryin, man."
"I'm all right!" Stan said loudly, still crying. "I can stand to be scared, but I hate being dirty like this, I hate not knowing where I am-"
"D-Do y-y-you th-think a-a-any of the muh-matches are still a-a-any guh-good?" Bill asked Richie.
"I gave mine to Bev."
Bill felt a hand touch his in the darkness and press a folder of matches into it. They felt dry.
"I kept them in my armpit," she said. "They might work. You can try them, anyway."
Bill tore a match out of the folder and struck it. It popped alight and he held it up. His friends were huddled together, wincing at the brief bright flare of light. They were splashed and daubed with ordure and they all looked very young and very afraid. Behind them he could see the sewer-pipe they had come out of. The pipe they were in now was smaller still. It ran straight in both directions, its floor caked with layers of filthy sediment. And-
He drew in a quick hiss and shook the match out as it burned his fingers. He listened and heard the sounds of fast-running water, dripping water, the occasional gushing roar as the overflow valves worked, sending more sewage into the Kenduskeag, which was now God only knew how far behind them. He didn't hear Henry and the others-yet.
He said quietly, "There's a d-d-dead bob-body on my r-r-right. About t-t-ten fuh-feet a-a-away from uh-us. I think it m-might be Puh-Puh-Puh-"
"Patrick?" Beverly asked, her voice trembling on the edge of hysteria. "Is it Patrick Hockstetter?"
"Y-Y-Yes. Do you want me to luh-light a-a-another m-match?"
Eddie said, "You got to, Bill. If I don't see how the pipe runs, I won't know which way to go."
Bill lit the match. In its glow they all saw the green, swelled thing that had been Patrick Hockstetter. The corpse grinned at them in the dark with horrid chumminess, but with only half a face; sewer rats had taken the rest. Patrick's summer-school books were scattered around him, bloated to the size of dictionaries in the damp.
"Christ," Mike said hoarsely, his eyes wide.
"I hear them again," Beverly said. "Henry and the others."
The acoustics must have carried her voice to them as well; Henry bellowed down the sewer-pipe and for a moment it was as if he was standing right there.
"We'll getyouuuuuu-"
"You come on right ahead!" Richie shouted. His eyes were bright, dancing, febrile. "Keep coming, banana-heels! This is just like the YMCA swimming pool down here! Keep-"
Then a shriek of such mad fear and pain came through the pipe that the guttering match fell from Bill's fingers and went out. Eddie's arm had curled around him and Bill hugged Eddie back, feeling his body trembling like a wire as Stan Uris packed close to him on the other side. That shriek rose and rose... and then there was an obscene, thick flapping noise, and the shriek was cut off.
"Something got one of them," Mike choked, horrified, in the darkness. "something... some monster... Bill, we got to get out of here... please..."
Bill could hear whoever was left-one or two, with the acoustics it was impossible to tell-stumbling and scrabbling through the sewer-pipe toward them. "Wuh-Which w-w-way, Eh-Eddie?" he asked urgently. "d-Do you nuh-know?"
"Toward the Canal?" Eddie asked, shaking in Bill's arms.
"Yes!"
To the right. Past Patrick... or over him." Eddie's voice suddenly hardened. "I don't care that much. He was one of the ones that broke my arm. Spit in my face, too."
"Let's guh-go," Bill said, looking back at the sewer-pipe they had just quitted. "s-Single luh-line! Keep a t-t-touch on e-each uh-uh-other, like b-b-before!"
He groped forward, dragging his right shoulder along the slimy porcelain surface of the pipe, gritting his teeth, not wanting to step on Patrick... or into him.
So they crawled farther into the darkness while waters rushed around them and while, outside, the storm walked and talked and brought an early darkness to Derry-a darkness that screamed with wind and stuttered with electric fire and racketed with falling trees that sounded like the death-cries of huge prehistoric creatures.
3
IT / MAY 1985
Now they were coming again, and while everything had gone much as It had foreseen, something It had not foreseen had returned: that maddening, galling fear... that sense of Another. It hated the fear, would have turned on it and eaten it if It could have... but the fear danced mockingly out of reach, and It could only kill the fear by kitting them.
Surely there was no need for such fear; they were older now, and their number had been reduced from seven to five. Five was a number of power, but it did not have the mystical talismanic quality of seven. It was true that Its dogsbody hadn't been able to kill the librarian, but the librarian would die in the hospital. Later, just before dawn touched the sky, It would send a male nurse with a bad pill habit to finish the librarian once and for all.
The writer's woman was now with It, alive yet not alive-her mind had been utterly destroyed by her first sight of It as It really was, with all of Its little masks and glamours thrown aside-and all of the glamours were only mirrors, of course, throwing back at the terrified viewer the worst thing in his or her own mind, heliographing images as a mirror may bounce a reflection of the sun into a wide unsuspecting eye and stun it to blindness.
Now the mind of the writer's wife was with It, in It, beyond the end of the macroverse; in the darkness beyond the Turtle; in the outlands beyond all lands.
She was in Its eye; she was in Its mind.
She was in the deadlights.
Oh but the glamours were amusing. Hanlon, for instance. He would not remember, not consciously, but his mother could have told him where the bird he had seen at the Ironworks came from. When he was a baby only six months old, his mother had left him sleeping in his cradle in the side yard while she went around back to hang sheets and diapers on the line. His screams had brought her on the run. A large crow had lighted on the edge of the carriage and was pecking at baby Mikey like an evil creature in a nursery tale. He had been screaming in pain and terror, unable to drive away the crow, which had sensed weak prey. She had struck the bird with her fist and driven it off, seen that it had brought blood in two or three places on baby Mikey's arms, and taken him to Dr Stillwagon for a tetanus shot. A part of Mike had remembered that always-tiny baby, giant bird-and when It came to Mike, Mike had seen the giant bird again.
But when the dogsbody husband of the girl from before brought the writer's woman, It had put on no face-It did not dress when It was at home. The dogsbody husband had looked once and had dropped dead of shock, his face gray, his eyes filling with the blood that had squirted out of his brain in a dozen places. The writer's woman had put out one powerful, horrified thought-OH DEAR JESUS IT IS FEMALE-and then all thoughts ceased. She swam in the deadlights. It came down from Its place and took care of her physical remains; prepared them for later feeding. Now Audra Denbrough hung high up in the middle of things, crisscrossed in silk, her head lolling against the socket of her shoulder, her eyes wide and glazed, her toes pointing down.
But there was still power in them. Diminished but still there. They had come here as children and somehow, against all the odds, against all that was supposed to be, all that could be, they had hurt It badly, had almost killed It, had forced It to flee deep into the earth, where it huddled, hurt and hating and trembling in a spreading pool of Its own strange blood.
So another new thing, if you please: for the first time in Its neverending history, It needed to make a plan; for the first time It found Itself afraid simply to take what It wanted from Derry, Its private game-preserve.
It had always fed well on children. Many adults could be used without knowing they had been used, and It had even fed on a few of the older ones over the years-adults had their own terrors, and their glands could be tapped, opened so that all the chemicals of fear flooded the body and salted the meat. But their fears were mostly too complex. The fears of children were simpler and usually more powerful. The fears of children could often be summoned up in a single face... and if bait were needed, why, what child did not love a clown?
It understood vaguely that these children had somehow turned Its own tools against It-that, by coincidence (surely not on purpose, surely not guided by the hand of any Other), by the bonding of seven extraordinarily imaginative minds, It had been Drought into a zone of great danger. Any of these seven alone would have been Its meat and drink, and if they had not happened to come together, It surely would have picked them off one by one, drawn by the quality of their minds just as a lion might be drawn to one particular waterhole by the scent of zebra. But together they had discovered an alarming secret that even It had not been aware of: that belief has a second edge. If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one-probably a child-who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home.
Yet in the end It had escaped; had gone deep, and the exhausted, terrified children had elected not to follow It when It was at Its most vulnerable. They had elected to believe It dead or dying, and had retreated.
It was aware of their oath, and had known they would come back just as a lion knows the zebra will eventually return to the waterhole. It had begun to plan even as It began to drowse. When It woke It would be healed, renewed-but their childhoods would be burned away like seven fatty candles. The former power of their imaginations would be muted and weak. They would no longer imagine that there were piranha in the Kenduskeag or that if you stepped on a crack you might really break your mother's back or that if you killed a ladybug which lit on your shin your house would catch fire that night. Instead, they would believe in insurance. Instead, they would believe in wine with dinner-something nice but not too pretentious, like a Pouilly-Fuisse '83, and let that breathe, waiter, would you? Instead, they would believe that Rolaids consume forty-seven times their own weight in excess stomach acid. Instead, they would believe in public television, Gary Hart, running to prevent heart attacks, giving up red meat to prevent colon cancer. They would believe in Dr Ruth when it came to getting well fucked and Jerry Falwell when it came to getting well saved. As each year passed their dreams would grow smaller. And when It woke It would call them back, yes, back, because fear was fertile, its child was rage, and rage cried for revenge.
It would call them and then kill them.
Only now that they were coming, the fear had returned. They had grown up, and their imaginations had weakened-but not as much as It had believed. It had felt an ominous, upsetting growth in their power when they joined together, and It had wondered for the first time if It had perhaps made a mistake.
But why be gloomy? The die was cast and not all the omens were bad. The writer was half-mad for his wife, and that was good. The writer was the strongest, the one who had somehow trained his mind for this confrontation over all the years, and when the writer was dead with his guts falling out of his body, when their precious "Big Bill" was dead, the others would be Its quickly.
It would feed well... and then perhaps It would go deep again. And doze. For awhile.
4
IN THE TUNNELS / 4:30 A.M.
"Bill!" Richie shouted into the echoing pipe. He was moving as fast as he could, but that wasn't very fast. He remembered that as kids they had walked bent over in this pipe, which led away from the pumping-station in the Barrens. He was crawling now, and the pipe seemed impossibly tight. His glasses kept wanting to slide off the end of his nose and he kept pushing them up again. He could hear Bev and Ben behind him.
"Bill!" he bawled again. "Eddie!"
"I'm here!" Eddie's voice floated back.
"Where's Bill?" Richie shouted.
"Up ahead!" Eddie called. He was very close now, and Richie sensed rather than saw him just ahead. "He wouldn't wait!"
Richie's head butted Eddie's leg. A moment later Bev's head butted Richie's ass.
"Bill!" Richie screamed at the top of his voice. The pipe channelled his shout and sent it back at him, hurting his own ears. "Bill, wait for us! We have to go together, don't you know that?"
Faintly, echoing, Bill: "Audra! Audra! Where are you?"
"Goddam you, Big Bill!" Richie cried softly. His glasses fell off. He cursed, groped for them, and set them, dripping, back on his nose. He pulled in breath and shouted again: "You'll get lost without Eddie, you fucking asshole! Wait up! Wait up for us! You hear me, Bill? WAIT UP FOR US, DAMMIT!"
There was an agonizing moment of silence. It seemed that no one breathed. All Richie could hear was distant dripping water; the drain was dry this time, except for the occasional stagnant puddle.
"Bill!" He ran a trembling hand through his hair and fought the tears. "COME ON... PLEASE, MAN! WAIT UP! PLEASE!"