It (171 page)

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.