It (161 page)

Bill surveyed the three pipes helplessly. The top one was venting water which was almost clear, although there were leaves and sticks
and bits of trash in it—cigarette butts, chewing-gum wrappers, things like that. The middle pipe was venting gray water. And from the lowest one came a grayish-brown flood of lumpy sewage.

“Eh-Eh-Eddie!”

Eddie floundered up beside him. His hair was plastered to his head. His cast was a soaking, drippy mess.

“Wh-Wh-Which wuh-wuh-one?” If you wanted to know how to build something, you asked Ben; if you wanted to know which way to go, you asked Eddie. They didn't talk about this, but they all knew it. If you were in a strange neighborhood and wanted to get back to a place you knew, Eddie could get you there, making lefts and rights with undiminished confidence until you were reduced simply to following him and hoping that things would turn out right . . . which they always seemed to do. Bill told Richie once that when he and Eddie first began to play in the Barrens, he, Bill, was constantly afraid of getting lost. Eddie had no such fears, and he always brought the two of them out right where he said he was going to. “If I g-g-got luh-lost in the Hainesville Woods and Eh-Eddie was with me, I wouldn't wuh-hurry a b-bit,” Bill told Richie. “He just
nuh-nuh-knows.
My d-d-dad says some people, ih-hit's l-like they got a cuh-huh-hompass in their heads. Eddie's l-l-like that.”

“
I can't hear you!”
Eddie shouted.

“I said wh-which
one?”

“Which one
what?”
Eddie had his aspirator clutched in his good hand, and Bill thought he actually looked more like a drowned muskrat than a kid.

“Which one do we
tuh-tuh-take?”

“Well, that all depends on where we want to go,” Eddie said, and Bill could have cheerfully throttled him even though the question made perfect sense. Eddie was looking dubiously at the three pipes. They could fit into all of them, but the bottom one looked pretty snug.

Bill motioned the others to move up into a circle. “Where the fuck
is
Ih-Ih-It?” he asked them.

“Middle of town,” Richie said promptly. “Right under the middle of town. Near the Canal.”

Beverly was nodding. So was Ben. So was Stan.

“Muh-Muh-Mike?”

“Yes,” he said. “That's where It is. Near the Canal. Or under it.”

Bill looked back at Eddie. “W-W-Which one?”

Eddie pointed reluctantly at the lower pipe . . . and although Bill's heart sank, he wasn't at all surprised. “That one.”

“Oh, gross,” Stan said unhappily. “That's a shit-pipe.”

“We don't—” Mike began, and then broke off. He cocked his head in a listening gesture. His eyes were alarmed.

“What—” Bill began, and Mike put a finger across his lips in a
Shhhh!
gesture. Now Bill could hear it too: splashing sounds. Approaching. Grunts and muffled words. Henry still hadn't given up.

“Quick,” Ben said. “Let's go.”

Stan looked back the way they had come, then he looked at the lowest of the three pipes. He pressed his lips tightly together and nodded. “Let's go,” he said. “Shit washes off.”

“Stan the Man Gets Off A Good One!” Richie cried. “Wacka-wacka-wa—”

“Richie, will you shut
up?”
Beverly hissed at him.

Bill led them to the pipe, grimacing at the smell, and crawled in. The smell: it was sewage, it was shit, but there was another smell here, too, wasn't there? A lower, more vital smell. If an animal's grunt could have a smell (and, Bill supposed, if the animal in question had been eating the right things, it could), it would be like this undersmell.
We're headed in the right direction, all right. It's been here . . . and It's been here a lot.

By the time they had gone twenty feet, the air had grown rancid and poisonous. He squished slowly along, moving through stuff that wasn't mud. He looked back over his shoulder and said, “You fuh-fuh-follow right behind m-me, Eh-Eh-Eddie. I'll nuh-need y-you.”

The light faded to the faintest gray, held that way briefly, and then it was gone and they were

(out of the blue and)

into the black. Bill shuffled forward through the stink, feeling that he was almost cutting through it physically, one hand held out before him, part of him expecting that at any moment it would encounter rough hair and green lamplike eyes would open in the darkness. The end would come in one hot flare of pain as It walloped his head off his shoulders.

The dark was stuffed with sounds, all of them magnified and echoing.
He could hear his friends shuffling along behind him, sometimes muttering something. There were gurglings and strange clanking groans. Once a flood of sickeningly warm water washed past and between his legs, wetting him to the thighs and rocking him back on his heels. He felt Eddie clutch frantically at the back of his shirt, and then the small flood slackened. From the end of the line Richie bellowed with sorry good humor: “I think we just been pissed on by the Jolly Green Giant, Bill.”

Bill could hear water or sewage running in controlled bursts through the network of smaller pipes which now must be over their heads. He remembered the conversation about Derry's sewers with his father and thought he knew what this pipe must be—it was to handle the overflow that only occurred during heavy rains and during the flood season. The stuff up there would be leaving Derry to be dumped in Torrault Stream and the Penobscot River. The city didn't like to pump its shit into the Kenduskeag because it made the Canal stink. But all the so-called gray water went into the Kenduskeag, and if there was too much for the regular sewer-pipes to handle, there would be a dump-off . . . like the one that had just happened. If there had been one, there could be another. He glanced up uneasily, not able to see anything but knowing that there must be grates in the top arch of the pipe, possibly in the sides as well, and that any moment there might be—

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 boh-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 don'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 get youuuuuu—”

“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.

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 killing 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.