It (164 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Looks like a cathedral,” Beverly said softly.

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

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

“I don't like it,” Stan said.

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

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

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

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

It went straight for Eddie.

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

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

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

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

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

He stopped then, and the silence seemed very large.

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

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

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

Eddie did, inhaling deeply and then wheezing.

“That was great, man,” Richie told Stan. “That was just frockin
great!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a heartbeat.

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

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

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

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

They had come to the place of It.

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

Bill marked it as a paper boat.

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

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

Richie saw two eyes behind a pair of spectacles.

Beverly saw a hand doubled up into a fist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We have to,” Bill said.

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

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

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

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

In the Tunnels/4:59
A.M.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“W-W-Who?”
Bill struck another match.

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

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

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

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

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

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