Richie called the hospital. Bill led Beverly over to the bed, where she sat with Eddie, looking off into space. She thought she would cry, but no tears came. The only feeling she was strongly and immediately aware of was a wish that someone would cover Henry Bowers. That winky look was really not cool at all.
In one giddy instant Richie became a reporter from the Derry News. He understood that Mr. Michael Hanlon, the town’s head librarian, had been assaulted while working late. Did the hospital have any word on Mr. Hanlon’s condition?
Richie listened, nodding.
“I understand, Mr. Kerpaskian—do you spell that with two k’s? You do. Okay. And you are—”
He listened, now enough into his own fiction to make doodling motions with one finger, as if writing on a pad.
“Uh-huh . . . uh-huh . . . yes. Yes, I understand. Well, what we usually do in cases like this is to quote you as ‘a source.’ Then, later on, we can . . . uh-huh . . . right! Just right!” Richie laughed heartily and armed a film of sweat from his forehead. He listened again. “Okay, Mr. Kerpaskian. Yes. I’ll . . . yes, I got it, K-E-R-P-A-S-K-I-A-N, right! Czech Jewish, is it? Really! That’s . . . that’s most unusual. Yes, I will. Goodnight. Thank you.”
He hung up and closed his eyes. “Jesus!” he cried in a thick, low voice. “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” He made as if to shove the phone off the table and then simply let his hand fall. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his pajama top.
“He’s alive, but in grave condition,” he told the others. “Henry sliced him up like a Christmas turkey. One of the cuts chopped into his femoral artery and he’s lost all the blood a man can and still stay alive. Mike managed to get some kind of tourniquet on it, or he would have been dead when they found him.”
Beverly began to cry. She did it like a child, with both hands plastered to her face. For a little while her hitching sobs and the rapid whistle of Eddie’s breathing were the only sounds in the room.
“Mike wasn’t the only one who got sliced up like a Christmas turkey,” Eddie said at last. “Henry looked like he just went twelve rounds with Rocky Balboa in a Cuisinart.”
“D-Do you still w-w-want to g-g-go to the p-p-police, Bev?”
There were Kleenex on the nighttable but they were a caked and sodden mass in the middle of a puddle of Perrier. She went into the bathroom, making a wide circle around Henry, got a washcloth, and ran cool water on it. It felt delicious against her hot puffy face. She felt that she could think clearly again—not rationally but clearly. She was suddenly sure that rationality would kill them if they tried to use it now. That cop. Rademacher. He had been suspicious. Why not? People didn’t call the library at three-thirty in the morning. He had assumed some guilty knowledge. What would he assume if he found out that she had called him from a room where there was a dead man on the floor with a jagged bottleneck planted in his guts? That she and four other strangers had just come into town the day before for a little reunion and this guy just happened to drop by? Would she buy the tale if the shoe were on the other foot? Would anyone? Of course, they could buttress their tale by adding that they had come back to finish the monster that lived in the drains under the city. That would certainly add a convincing note of gritty realism.
She came out of the bathroom and looked at Bill. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to go to the police. I think Eddie’s right—something might happen to us. Something final. But that isn’t the real reason.” She looked at the four of them. “We swore it,” she said. “We swore. Bill’s brother . . . Stan . . . all the others . . . and now Mike. I’m ready, Bill.”
Bill looked at the others.
Richie nodded. “Okay, Big Bill. Let’s try.”
Ben said, “The odds look worse than ever. We’re two short now.”
Bill said nothing.
“Okay.” Ben nodded. “She’s right. We swore.”
“E-E-Eddie?”
Eddie smiled wanly. “I guess I get another pigger-back down that ladder, huh? If the ladder’s still there.”
“No one throwing rocks this time, though,” Beverly said. “They’re dead. All three of them.”
“Do we do it now, Bill?” Richie asked.
“Y-Y-Yes,” Bill said. “I th-think this is the t-t-time.”
“Can I say something?” Ben asked abruptly.
Bill looked at him and grinned a little. “A-A-Any time.”
“You guys are still the best friends I ever had,” Ben said. “No matter how this turns out. I just . . . you know, wanted to tell you that.”
He looked around at them, and they looked solemnly back at him.
“I’m glad I remembered you,” he added. Richie snorted. Beverly giggled. Then they were all laughing, looking at each other in the old way, in spite of the fact that Mike was in the hospital, perhaps dying or already dead, in spite of the fact that Eddie’s arm was broken (again), in spite of the fact that it was the deepest ditch of the morning.
“Haystack, you have such a way with words,” Richie said, laughing and wiping his eyes. “He should have been the writer, Big Bill.”
Still smiling a little, Bill said: “And on that nuh-nuh-note—”
They took Eddie’s borrowed limo. Richie drove. The groundfog was thicker now, drifting through the streets like cigarette smoke, not quite reaching the hooded streetlamps. The stars overhead were bright chips of ice, spring stars . . . but by cocking his head to the half-open window on the passenger side, Bill thought he could hear summer thunder in the distance. Rain was being ordered up somewhere over the horizon.
Richie turned on the radio and there was Gene Vincent singing “Be-Bop-A-Lula.” He hit one of the other buttons and got Buddy Holly. A third punch brought Eddie Cochran singing “Summertime Blues.”
“I’d like to help you, son, but you’re too young to vote,” a deep voice said.
“Turn it off, Richie,” Beverly said softly.
He reached for it, and then his hand froze. “Stay tuned for more of the Richie Tozier All-Dead Rock Show!” the clown’s laughing, screaming voice cried over the finger-pops and guitar-chops of the Eddie Cochran tune. “Don’t touch that dial, keep it tuned to the rockpile, they’re gone from the charts but not from our hearts and you keep coming, come right along, come on everybody! We play aaaalll the hits down here! Aaallllll the hits! And if you don’t believe me, just listen to this morning’s graveyard-shift guest deejay, Georgie Denbrough! Tell em, Georgie!”
And suddenly Bill’s brother was wailing out of the radio.
“You sent me out and It killed me! I thought It was in the cellar, Big Bill, I thought It was in the cellar but It was in the drain, It was in the drain and It killed me, you let It kill me, Big Bill, you let It—”
Richie snapped the radio off so hard the knob spun away and hit the floormat.
“Rock and roll in the sticks really sucks,” he said. His voice was not quite steady. “Bev’s right, we’ll leave it off, what do you say?”
No one replied. Bill’s face was pale and still and thoughtful under the glow of the passing streetlamps, and when the thunder muttered again in the west they all heard it.
Same old bridge.
Richie parked beside it and they got out and moved to the railing—same old railing—and looked down.
Same old Barrens.
It seemed untouched by the last twenty-seven years; to Bill the turnpike overpass, which was the only new feature, looked unreal, something as ephemeral as a matte painting or a rear-screen projection effect in a movie. Cruddy little trees and scrub bushes glimmered in the twining fog and Bill thought: I guess this is what we mean when we talk about the persistence of memory, this or something like this, something you see at the right time and from the right angle, image that kicks off emotion like a jet engine. You see it so clear that all the things which happened in between are gone. If desire is what closes the circle between world and want, then the circle has closed.
“Cuh-Cuh-Come on,” he said, and climbed over the railing. They followed him down the embankment in a scatter of scree and pebbles. When they reached the bottom Bill checked automatically for Silver and then laughed at himself. Silver was leaning against the wall of Mike’s garage. It seemed Silver had no part to play in this at all, although that was strange, after the way it had turned up.
“Tuh-Take us there,” Bill told Ben.
Ben looked at him and Bill read the thought in his eyes—It’s been twenty-seven years, Bill, dream on—and then he nodded and headed into the undergrowth.
The path—their path—had long since grown over, and they had to force themselves through tangles of thornbushes, prickers, and wild hydrangea so fragrant it was cloying. Crickets sang somnolently all around them, and a few lightning-bugs, early arrivals at summer’s luscious party, poked at the dark. Bill supposed kids still played down here, but they had made their own runs and secret ways.
They came to the clearing where the clubhouse had been, but now there was no clearing here at all. Bushes and lackluster scrub pines had reclaimed it all.
“Look,” Ben whispered, and crossed the clearing (in their memories it was still here, simply overlaid with another of those matte paintings). He yanked at something. It was the mahogany door they had found on the edge of the dump, the one they had used to finish off the clubhouse roof. It had been cast aside here and looked as if it hadn’t been touched in a dozen years or more. Creepers were firmly entrenched across its dirty surface.
“Leave it alone, Haystack,” Richie murmured. “It’s old.”
“Tuh-Tuh-Take us th-there, B-Ben,” Bill repeated from behind them.
So they went down to the Kenduskeag following him, bearing left away from the clearing that didn’t exist anymore. The sound of running water grew steadily louder, but they still almost fell into the Kenduskeag before any of them saw it: the foliage had grown up in a tangled wall on the edge of the embankment. The edge broke off under the heels of Ben’s cowboy boots and Bill yanked him back by the scruff of the neck.
“Thanks,” Ben said.
“De nada. In the o-old d-days, you wuh-hould have puh-pulled me ih-in a-a-after you. D-Down this wuh-way?”
Ben nodded and led them along the overgrown bank, fighting through the tangles of bushes and brambles, thinking how much easier this was when you were only four feet five and able to go under most tangles (those in your mind as well as those in your path, he supposed) in one nonchalant duck. Well, everything changed. Our lesson for today, boys and girls, is the more things change, the more things change. Whoever said the more things change the more things stay the same was obviously suffering severe mental retardation. Because—
His foot hooked under something and he fell over with a thud, nearly striking his head on the pumping-station’s concrete cylinder. It was almost completely buried in a wallow of blackberry bushes. As he got to his feet again he realized that his face and arms and hands had been striped by blackberry thorns in two dozen places.
“Make that three dozen,” he said, feeling thin blood running down his cheeks.
“What?” Eddie asked.
“Nothing.” He bent down to see what he had tripped over. A root, probably.
But it wasn’t a root. It was the iron manhole cover. Someone had pushed it off.
Of course, Ben thought. We did. Twenty-seven years ago.
But he realized that was crazy even before he saw fresh metal twinkling through the rust in parallel scrape-marks. The pump hadn’t been working that day. Sooner or later someone would have come down to fix it, and would have replaced the cover in the bargain.
He stood up and the five of them gathered around the cylinder and looked in. They could hear the faint sound of dripping water. That was all. Richie had brought all the matches from Eddie’s room. Now he lit an entire book of them and tossed it in. For a moment they could see the cylinder’s damp inner sleeve and the silent bulk of the pumping machinery. That was all.
“Could have been off for a long time,” Richie said uneasily. “Didn’t necessarily have to happen t—”
“It’s happened fairly recently,” Ben said. “Since the last rain, anyway.” He took another book of matches from Richie, lit one, and pointed out the fresh scratches.
“There’s suh-suh-something uh-under it,” Bill said as Ben shook out the match.
“What?” Ben asked.
“C-C-Couldn’t tuh-tuh-tell. Looked like a struh-struh-strap. You and Rih-Richie help me t-t-turn it o-over.”
They grabbed the cover and flipped it like a giant coin. This time Beverly lit the match and Ben cautiously picked up the purse which had been under the manhole cover. He held it up by the strap. Beverly started to shake out the match and then looked at Bill’s face. She froze until the flame touched the ends of her fingers and then dropped it with a little gasp. “Bill? What is it? What’s wrong?”
Bill’s eyes felt too heavy. They couldn’t leave that scuffed leather bag with its long leather strap. Suddenly he could remember the name of the song which had been playing on the radio in the back room of the leather-goods shop when he had bought it for her. “Sausalito Summer Nights.” It was the surpassing weirdism. All the spit was gone out of his mouth, leaving his tongue and inner cheeks as smooth and dry as chrome. He could hear the crickets and see the lightning-bugs and smell big green dark growing out of control all around him and he thought It’s another trick another illusion she’s in England and this is just a cheap shot because It’s scared, oh yes, It’s maybe not as sure as It was when It called us all back, and really, Bill, get serious—how many scuffed leather purses with long straps do you think there are in the world? A million? Ten million?
Probably more. But only one like this. He had bought it for Audra in a Burbank leather-goods store while “Sausalito Summer Nights” played on the radio in the back room.
“Bill?” Beverly’s hand on his shoulder, shaking him. Far away. Twenty-seven leagues under the sea. What was the name of the group that sang “Sausalito Summer Nights”? Richie would know.
“I know,” Bill said calmly into Richie’s scared, wide-eyed face, and smiled. “It was Diesel. How’s that for total recall?”
“Bill, what’s wrong?” Richie whispered.
Bill screamed. He snatched the matches out of Beverly’s hand, lit one, and then yanked the purse away from Ben.
“Bill, Jesus, what—”
He unzipped the purse and turned it over. What fell out was so much Audra that for a moment he was too unmanned to scream again. Amid the Kleenex, sticks of chewing gum, and items of makeup, he saw a tin of Altoid mints . . . and the jewelled compact Freddie Firestone had given her when she signed for Attic Room.
“My wuh-wuh-wife’s down there,” he said, and fell on his knees and began pushing her things back into the purse. He brushed hair that no longer existed out of his eyes without even thinking about it.
“Your wife? Audra?” Beverly’s face was shocked, her eyes huge.
“Her p-p-purse. Her th-things.”
“Jesus, Bill,” Richie muttered. “That can’t be, you know th—”
He had found her alligator wallet. He opened it and held it up. Richie lit another match and was looking at a face he had seen in half a dozen movies. The picture on Audra’s California driver’s license was less glamorous but completely conclusive.
“But Huh-Huh-Henry’s dead, and Victor, and B-B-Belch . . . so who’s got her?” He stood up, staring around at them with febrile intensity. “Who’s got her?”
Ben put a hand on Bill’s shoulder. “I guess we better go down and find out, huh?”
Bill looked around at him, as if unsure of who Ben might be, and then his eyes cleared. “Y-Yeah,” he said. “Eh-Eh-Eddie?”
“Bill, I’m sorry.”
“Can you cluh-climb on?”
“I did once.”
Bill bent over and Eddie hooked his right arm around Bill’s neck. Ben and Richie boosted him up until he could hook his legs around Bill’s midsection. As Bill swung one leg clumsily over the lip of the cylinder, Ben saw that Eddie’s eyes were tightly shut . . . and for a moment he thought he heard the world’s ugliest cavalry charge bashing its way through the bushes. He turned, expecting to see the three of them come out of the fog and the brambles, but all he had heard was the rising breeze rattling the bamboo a quarter of a mile or so from here. Their old enemies were all gone now.
Bill gripped the rough concrete lip of the cylinder and felt his way down, step by step and rung by rung. Eddie had him in a deathgrip and Bill could barely breathe. Her purse, dear God, how did her purse get here? Doesn’t matter. But if You’re there, God, and if You’re taking requests, let her be all right, don’t let her suffer for what Bev and I did tonight or for what I did one summer when I was a boy . . . and was it the clown? Was it Bob Gray who got her? If it was, I don’t know if even God can help her.
“I’m scared, Bill,” Eddie said in a thin voice.
Bill’s foot touched cold standing water. He lowered himself into it, remembering the feel and the dank smell, remembering the claustrophobic way this place had made him feel . . . and, just by the way, what had happened to them? How had they fared down in these drains and tunnels? Where exactly had they gone, and how exactly had they gotten out again? He still couldn’t remember any of that; all he could think of was Audra.
“I am t-t-too.” He half-squatted, wincing as the cold water ran into his pants and over his balls, and let Eddie off. They stood shin-deep in the water and watched the others descend the ladder.
Something new had happened.
For the first time in forever, something new.
Before the universe there had been only two things. One was Itself and the other was the Turtle. The Turtle was a stupid old thing that never came out of its shell. It thought that maybe the Turtle was dead, had been dead for the last billion years or so. Even if it wasn’t, it was still a stupid old thing, and even if the Turtle had vomited the universe out whole, that didn’t change the fact of its stupidity.
It had come here long after the Turtle withdrew into its shell, here to Earth, and It had discovered a depth of imagination here that was almost new, almost of concern. This quality of imagination made the food very rich. Its teeth rent flesh gone stiff with exotic terrors and voluptuous fears: they dreamed of nightbeasts and moving muds; against their will they contemplated endless gulphs.
Upon this rich food It existed in a simple cycle of waking to eat and sleeping to dream. It had created a place in Its own image, and It looked upon this place with favor from the deadlights which were Its eyes. Derry was Its killing-pen, the people of Derry Its sheep. Things had gone on.
Then . . . these children.
Something new.
For the first time in forever.
When It had burst up into the house on Neibolt Street, meaning to kill them all, vaguely uneasy that It had not been able to do so already (and surely that unease had been the first new thing), something had happened which was totally unexpected, utterly unthought of, and there had been pain, pain, great roaring pain all through the shape it had taken, and for one moment there had also been fear, because the only thing It had in common with the stupid old Turtle and the cosmology of the macroverse outside the puny egg of this universe was just this: all living things must abide by the laws of the shape they inhabit. For the first time It realized that perhaps Its ability to change Its shapes might work against It as well as for It. There had never been pain before, there had never been fear before, and for a moment It had thought It might die—oh Its head had been filled with a great white silver pain, and it had roared and mewled and bellowed and somehow the children had escaped.
But now they were coming. They had entered Its domain under the city, seven foolish children blandering through the darkness without lights or weapons. It would kill them now, surely.
It had made a great self-discovery: It did not want change or surprise. It did not want new things, ever. It wanted only to eat and sleep and dream and eat again.
Following the pain and that brief bright fear, another new emotion had arisen (as all genuine emotions were new to It, although It was a great mocker of emotions): anger. It would kill the children because they had, by some amazing accident, hurt It. But It would make them suffer first because for one brief moment they had made It fear them.
Come to me then, It thought, listening to their approach. Come to me, children, and see how we float down here . . . how we all float.
And yet there was a thought that insinuated itself no matter how strongly It tried to push the thought away. It was simply this: if all things flowed from It (as they surely had done since the Turtle sicked up the universe and then fainted inside its shell), how could any creature of this or any other world fool It or hurt It, no matter how briefly or triflingly? How was that possible?
And so a last new thing had come to It, this not an emotion but a cold speculation: suppose It had not been alone, as It had always believed?
Suppose there was Another?
And suppose further that these children were agents of that Other?
Suppose . . . suppose . . .
It began to tremble.
Hate was new. Hurt was new. Being crossed in Its purpose was new. But the most terrible new thing was this fear. Not fear of the children, that had passed, but the fear of not being alone.
No. There was no other. Surely there was not. Perhaps because they were children their imaginations had a certain raw power It had briefly underestimated. But now that they were coming, It would let them come. They would come and It would cast them one by one into the macroverse . . . into the deadlights of Its eyes.
Yes.
When they got here It would cast them, shrieking and insane, into the deadlights.
Bev and Richie had maybe ten matches between them, but Bill wouldn’t let them use them. For the time being, at least, there was still dim light in the drain. Not much, but he could make out the next four feet in front of him, and as long as he could keep doing that, they would save the matches.
He supposed the little light they were getting must be coming from vents in curbings over their heads, maybe even from the circular vents in manhole covers. It seemed surpassingly strange to think they were under the city, but of course by now they must be.
The water was deeper now. Three times dead animals had floated past: a rat, a kitten, a bloated shiny thing that might have been a woodchuck. He heard one of the others mutter disgustedly as that baby cruised by.
The water they were crawling through was relatively placid, but all that was going to come to an end fairly soon: there was a steady hollow roaring not too far up ahead. It grew louder, rising to a one-note roar. The drain elbowed to the right. They made the turn and here were three pipes spewing water into their pipe. They were lined up vertically like the lenses on a traffic light. The drain dead-ended here. The light was marginally brighter. Bill looked up and saw they were in a square stone-faced shaft about fifteen feet high. There was a sewer-grating up there and water was sloshing down on them in buckets. It was like being in a primitive shower.
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.