It Read online

  Yet in the end It had escaped; had gone deep, and the exhausted, terrified children had elected not to follow It when It was at Its most vulnerable. They had elected to believe It dead or dying, and had retreated.

  It was aware of their oath, and had known they would come back just as a lion knows the zebra will eventually return to the waterhole. It had begun to plan even as It began to drowse. When It woke It would be healed, renewed--but their childhoods would be burned away like seven fatty candles. The former power of their imaginations would be muted and weak. They would no longer imagine that there were piranha in the Kenduskeag or that if you stepped on a crack you might really break your mother's back or that if you killed a ladybug which lit on your shirt your house would catch fire that night. Instead, they would believe in insurance. Instead, they would believe in wine with dinner-something nice but not too pretentious, like a Pouilly-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!"

  And, fainter still, Bill's voice came back: "I'm waiting."

  "Thank God for small favors," Richie muttered. He slapped Eddie's can. "Go."

  "I don't know how long I can with just one arm," Eddie said apologetically.

  "Go anyway," Richie said, and Eddie began crawling again.

  Bill, looking haggard and almost used-up, was waiting for them in the sewer-shaft where the three pipes were lined up like lenses on a dead traffic light. There was room enough here for them to stand up.

  "Over there," Bill said. "Cuh-Criss. And B-B-Belch."

  They looked. Beverly moaned and Ben put an arm around her. The skeleton of Belch Huggins, clad in moldering rags, seemed more or less intact. What remained of Victor was headless. Bill looked across the shaftway and saw a grinning skull.

  There it was; there was the rest of him. Should have left it alone, guys, Bill thought, and shivered.

  This section of the sewer system had fallen into disuse; Richie thought the reason why was pretty clear. The waste-treatment plant had taken over. Sometime during the years when they were all busy learning to shave, to drive, to smoke, to fuck around a little, all that good shit, the Environmental Protection Agency had come into being, and the EPA had decided dumping raw sewage--and even gray water--into rivers and streams was a no-no. So this part of the sewer system had simply moldered, and the bodies of Victor Criss and Belch Huggins had moldered along with it. Like Peter Pan's Wild Boys, Victor and Belch had never grown up. Here were the skeletons of two boys in the shredded remains of tee-shirts and jeans that had rotted away to rags. Moss had grown over the warped xylophone of Victor's ribcage, and over the eagle on thr buckle of his garrison-belt.

  "Monster got em," Ben said softly. "Do you remember? We heard it happen."

  "Audra's d-dead." Bill's voice was mechanical. "I know it."

  "You don't know any such thing!" Beverly said with such fury that Bill stirred and looked at her. "All you know for sure is that a lot of other people have died, most of them children." She walked across to him and stood before him with her hands on her hips. Her face and hands were streaked with grime, her hair matted with dirt. Richie thought she looked absolutely magnificent. "And you know what did it."

  "I nuh-never should have t-t-told her where I was guhgoing," Bill said. "Why did I do that? Why did I--"

  Her hands pistoned out and seized him by the shirt. Amazed, Richie watched as she shook him.

  "No more! You know what we came for! We swore, and we're going to do it! Do you understand me, Bill? If she's dead, she's dead ... but It's not! Now, we need you. Do you get it? We need you!" She was crying now. "So you stand up for us! You stand up for us like before or none of us are going to get out of here!"

  He looked at her for a long time without speaking, and Richie found himself thinking, Come on, Big Bill. Come on, come on--

  Bill looked around at the rest of them and nodded. "Eh-Eddie."

  "I'm here, Bill."

  "D-Do y-you still ruh-remember which p-p-pipe?"

  Eddie pointed past Victor and said: "That's the one. Looks pretty small, doesn't it?"

  Bill nodded again. "Can you do it? With your a-a-arm broken?"

  "I can for you, Bill."

  Bill smiled: the weariest, most terrible smile Richie had ever seen. "Tuh-hake us there, Eh-Eddie. Let's g-get it done."

  5

  In the Tunnels/4:55 A.M.

  As he crawled, Bill reminded himself of the dropoff at the end of this pipe, but it still surprised him. At one moment his hands were shuffling along the crusted surface of the old pipe; at the next they were skating on air. He pitched forward and rolled instinctively, landing on his shoulder with a painful crunch.

  "Be c-c-careful!" he heard himself shouting. "Here's the druh-hopoff! Eh-Eh-Eddie?"

  "Here!" One of Eddie's waving hands brushed across Bill's forehead. "Can you help me out?"

  He got his arms around Eddie and lifted him out, trying to be careful of the bad arm. Ben came next, then Bev, then Richie.

  "You got any muh-muh-matches, Ruh-Richie?"

  "I do," Beverly said. Bill felt a hand touch hi
s in the darkness and press a folder of matches into it. "There's only eight or ten, but Ben's got more. From the room."

  Bill said, "Did you keep them in your a-a-armpit, B-Bev?"

  "Not this time," she said, and put her arms around him in the dark. He hugged her tight, eyes closed, trying to take the comfort she wanted so badly to give.

  He released her gently and struck a match. The power of memory was great--they all looked at once to their right. What remained of Patrick Hockstetter's body was still there, amid a few lumpy, overgrown things that might have been books. The only really recognizable thing was a jutting semicircle of teeth, two or three of them with fillings.

  And something nearby. A gleaming circle barely seen in the match's guttering light.

  Bill shook the match out and lit another. He picked it up. "Audra's wedding ring," he said. His voice was hollow, expressionless.

  The match went out in his fingers.

  In the darkness he put the ring on.

  "Bill?" Richie said hesitantly. "Do you have any idea

  6

  In the Tunnels/2:20 P.M.

  how long they had been wandering through the tunnels under Derry since they had left the place where Patrick Hockstetter's body was, but Bill was sure he could never find his way back. He kept thinking about what his father had said: You could wander for weeks. If Eddie's sense of direction failed them now, they wouldn't need It to kill them; they would wander until they died... or, if they got into the wrong set of pipes, until they were drowned like rats in a rain-barrel.

  But Eddie didn't seem a bit worried. Every now and then he would ask Bill to light one of their diminishing store of matches, look around thoughtfully, and then set off again. He made rights and lefts seemingly at random. Sometimes the pipes were so big Bill could not reach their tops even by stretching his hand up all the way. Sometimes they had to crawl, and once, for five horrible minutes (which felt more like five hours), they wormed their way along on their bellies, Eddie now leading, the others following with their noses to the heels of the person ahead.

  The only thing Bill was completely sure of was that they had somehow gotten into a disused section of the Derry sewer system. They had left all the active pipes either far behind or far above. The roar of running water had dimmed to a far-off thunder. These pipes were older, not kiln-fired ceramic but a crumbly claylike stuff that sometimes oozed springs of unpleasant-smelling fluid. The smells of human waste--those ripe gassy smells that had threatened to suffocate them all--had faded, but they had been replaced by another smell, yellow and ancient, that was worse.

  Ben thought it was the smell of the mummy. To Eddie it smelled like the leper. Richie thought it smelled like the world's oldest flannel jacket, now moldering and rotting--a lumberman's jacket, a very big one, big enough for a character like Paul Bunyan, perhaps. To Beverly it smelled like her father's sock-drawer. In Stan Uris it woke a dreadful memory from his earliest childhood--an oddly Jewish memory in a boy who had only the haziest understanding of his own Jewishness. It smelled like clay mixed with oil and made him think of an eyeless, mouthless demon called the Golem, a clay man that renegade Jews were supposed to have raised in the Middle Ages to save them from the goyim who robbed them and raped their women and then sent them packing. Mike thought of the dry smell of feathers in a dead nest.

  When they finally reached the end of the narrow pipe, they slithered like eels down the curved surface of another which ran at an oblique angle to the one they had been in, and found they could stand up again. Bill felt the heads of the matches left in the book. Four. His mouth tightened and he resolved not to tell the others how close they were to the end of their light ... not unless he absolutely had to.

  "Huh-Huh-How you g-g-guys d-doin?"

  They murmured replies, and he nodded in the dark. No panic, and no tears since Stan's. That was good. He felt for their hands and they stood together in the dark that way for awhile, both taking and giving from the touch. Bill felt clear exultation in this, a sure sense that they were somehow producing more than the sum of their seven selves; they had been re-added into a more potent whole.

  He lit one of the remaining matches and they saw a narrow tunnel stretching ahead on a downward slant. The top of this pipe was festooned with sagging cobwebs, some water-broken and hanging in shrouds. Looking at them gave Bill an atavistic chill. The floor here was dry but thick with ancient mold and what might have been leaves, fungus ... or some unimaginable droppings. Farther up he saw a pile of bones and a drift of green rags. They might once have been that stuff they called "polished cotton," workman's clothes. Bill imagined some Sewer Department or Water Department worker who had gotten lost, wandered down here, and been discovered....

  The match guttered. He tipped its head downward, wanting the light to last a little longer.

  "Do y-y-you nuhknow where w-w-we are?" he asked Eddie.

  Eddie pointed down the slightly crooked bore of the tunnel. "Canal's that way," he said. "Less'n half a mile, unless this thing turns in a different direction. We're under Up-Mile Hill right now, I think. But Bill--"

  The match burned Bill's fingers and he let it drop. They were in darkness again. Someone--Bill thought it was Beverly--sighed. But before the match had gone out, he had seen the worry on Eddie's face.

  "W-W-What? What ih-is it?"

  "When I say we're under Up-Mile Hill, I mean we're really under it. We been going down for a long time now. Nobody'd ever put sewer-pipe in this deep. When you put a tunnel this deep you call it a mine-shaft."

  "How deep do you figure we are, Eddie?" Richie asked.

  "Quarter of a mile," Eddie said. "Maybe more."

  "Jesus-please-us," Beverly said.

  "These aren't sewer-pipes, anyway," Stan said from behind them. "You can tell by that smell. It's bad, but it's not a sewery smell."

  "I think I'd rather smell the sewer," Ben said. "It smells like--"

  A scream floated down to them, issuing from the mouth of the pipe they had just left, lifting the hair on the nape of Bill's neck. The seven of them drew together, clutching each other.

  "--gonna get you sons of bitches. We're gonna get youuuuuuu--"

  "Henry," Eddie breathed. "Oh my God, he's still coming."

  "I'm not surprised," Richie said. "Some people are too stupid to quit."

  They could hear faint panting, the scrape of shoes, the whisper of cloth.

  "--youuuuuuuuu--"

  "Cuh-Cuh-Come on," Bill said.

  They started down the pipe, now walking double except for Mike, who was at the back of the line: Bill and Eddie, Richie and Bev, Ben and Stan.

  "H-H-How fuh-far b-b-back do y-you think H-H-Henry ih-his?"

  "I couldn't tell, Big Bill," Eddie said. "The echoes are bad." He dropped his voice. "Did you see that pile of bones?"

  "Y-Y-Yes," Bill said, dropping his own voice.

  "There was a tool-belt with the clothes. I think it was a Water Department guy."

  "I guh-guess s-s-so."

  "How long you think--?"

  "I d-d-don't nuh-nuh-know."

  Eddie closed his good hand over Bill's arm in the darkness.

  It was perhaps fifteen minutes later when they heard something coming toward them in the dark.

  Richie stopped, frozen cold all the way through. Suddenly he was three years eld again. He listened to that squelching, shifting movement--closing in on them, closing--and to the whispering branchlike sounds that accompanied it, and even before Bill struck a match he knew what it would be.

  "The Eye!" he screamed. "Christ, it's the Crawling Eye!"

  For a moment the others were not sure what they were seeing (Beverly had an impression that her father had found her, even down here, and Eddie had a fleeting vision of Patrick Hockstetter come back to life, somehow Patrick had flanked them and gotten in front of them), but Richie's cry, Richie's certainty, froze the shape for all of them. They saw what Richie saw.

  A gigantic Eye filled the tunnel, the glassy black
pupil two feet across, the iris a muddy russet color. The white was bulgy, membranous, laced with red veins that pulsed steadily. It was a lidless lashless gelatinous horror that moved on a bed of raw-looking tentacles. These fumbled over the tunnel's crumbly surface and sank in like fingers, so that the impression given in the glow of Bill's guttering match was of an Eye that had somehow grown nightmare fingers which were pulling It along.

  It stared at them with blank, feverish avarice. The match went out.

  In the darkness, Bill felt those branchlike tentacles caress his ankles, his shins ... but he could not move. His body was frozen solid. He sensed It approaching, he could feel the heat radiating out from It, and could hear the wet pulse of blood wetting Its membranes. He imagined the stickiness he would feel when It touched him and still he could not scream. Even when fresh tentacles slipped around his waist and hooked themselves into the loops of his jeans and began to drag him forward, he could not scream or struggle. A deadly sleepiness seemed to have suffused his whole body.

  Beverly felt one of the tentacles slip around the cup of her ear and suddenly draw noose-tight. Pain flared and she was dragged forward, twisting and moaning, as if an old-lady schoolteacher were giving her an out-of-patience come-along to the back of the room, where she would be forced to sit on a stool and wear a duncecap. Stan and Richie tried to back away, but a forest of unseen tentacles now wavered and whispered about them. Ben put an arm around Beverly and tried to tug her back. She clasped his hands with panicky tightness.

  "Ben . . . Ben, It's got me . . . ."

  "No It don't.... Wait ... I'll pull...."

  He pulled with all his might, and Beverly screamed as pain tore through her ear and blood began to flow. A tentacle, dry and hard, scraped over Ben's shirt, paused, then twisted in a painful knot around his shoulder.

  Bill put out a hand, and it slapped into a gluey yielding wetness. The Eye! his mind screamed. Oh God I got my hand in the Eye! Oh God! Oh dear sweet God! The Eye! My hand in the Eye!

  He began to fight now, but the tentacles drew him forward inexorably. His hand disappeared into that wet avid heat. His forearm. Now his arm was plunged into the Eye up to the elbow. At any moment the rest of his body would come against that sticky surface and he felt that he would go mad in that instant. He fought frantically, chopping at the tentacles with his other hand.