was exiting on the Kenduskeag side. She felt claustrophobia touch her throat, turning the skin there to something that felt like flannel. If the water rose enough, they would drown.
“Bill, do we have to?”
He shrugged. It said everything. Yeah, they had to; what else was there? Be killed by Henry, Victor, and Belch in the Barrens? Or by something else-maybe something worse-in town? She understood his thought well enough now; there was no stutter in his shrug. Better for them to go to It. Have it out, like the showdown in a Western movie. Cleaner. Braver.
Richie said: “What was that ritual you told us about, Big Bill? The one in the library book?”
“Ch-Ch-Chud,” Bill said, smiling a little.
“Chud.” Richie nodded. “You bite Its tongue and It bites yours, right?”
“Ruh-ruh-right.”
“Then you tell jokes.”
Bill nodded.
“Funny,” Richie said, looking into the dark pipe, “I can’t think of a single one.”
“Me either,” Ben said. The fear was heavy in his chest, almost suffocating. He felt that the only thing keeping him from just sitting down in the water and blubbering like a baby-or just going crazy-was Bill’s calm, sure presence… and Beverly. He felt he would rather die than show Beverly how afraid he was.
“Do you know where this pipe goes?” Stan asked Bill.
Bill shook his head.
“Do you know how to find It?”
Bill shook his head again.
“We’ll know when we’re getting close,” Richie said suddenly. He drew a deep, trembling breath. “If we have to do it, then let’s go.”
Bill nodded. “I’ll be f-f-first. Then Eh-Eddie. B-B-Ben. Bev. Stuh-han the M-M-Man. M-M-Mike. You luh-last, Rih-Richie. E-Everyone k-k-keep one h-h-hand on the shuh-houlder of the p-p-person in fruh-fruh-front of y-y-you. It’s gonna be d-dark.”
“You coming out?” Henry Bowers shrieked down at them.
“We’re gonna come out somewhere,” Richie muttered. “I guess.”
They formed up like a procession of blindmen. Bill looked back once, confirming that each had a hand on the shoulder of the person ahead. Then, bending forward slightly against the rush of the current, Bill Denbrough led his friends into the dark where the boat he had made for his brother had gone almost a year before.
Chapter 20
THE CIRCLE CLOSES
1
TOM
Tom Rogan was having one fuck of a crazy dream. In it he was killing his father.
Part of his mind understood how crazy this was; his father had died when Tom was only in the third grade. Well… maybe “died” wasn’t such a good word. Maybe “committed suicide” was actually the truth. Ralph Rogan had made himself a gin-and-lye cocktail. One for the road, you might say. Tom had been put in nominal charge of his brother and sisters, and then he began to receive “whuppins” if anything went wrong with them.
So he couldn’t have killed his father… except there he was, in this frightening dream, holding what looked like a harmless handle of some sort to his father’s neck… only it wasn’t really harmless, was it? There was a button in the end of the handle, and if he pushed it a blade would pop out and go right through his father’s neck. I’m not going to do anything like that, Daddy, don’t worry, his dreaming mind thought just before his finger jammed down on the button and the blade popped out. His father’s sleeping eyes opened and stared up at the ceiling; his father’s mouth opened and a bloody gargling sound came out. Daddy, I didn’t do it! his mind screamed. Someone else -
He struggled to wake up and couldn’t. The best he could do (and it turned out to be not very good at all) was to fade into a new dream. In this one he was splashing and slogging his way down a long dark tunnel. His balls hurt and his face stung because it was crisscrossed with scratches. There were others with him, but he could only make out vague shapes. It didn’t matter, anyway. What mattered were the kids somewhere up ahead. They needed to pay. They needed
(a whuppin)
to be punished.
Whatever purgatory this was, it was a smelly one. Water dripped and echoed. His shoes and pants were soaked. The little shitpots were somewhere up ahead in this maze of tunnels, and perhaps they thought
(Henry)
Tom and his friends would get lost, but the joke was on them
(ha-ha all over you!)
because he had another friend, oh yes, a special friend, and this friend had marked the path they were to take with… with…
(Moon-Balloons)
thingamajigs that were big and round and somehow lighted from within so that they shed a glow like that which falls mysteriously from oldfashioned streetlamps. One of these balloons floated and drifted at each intersection, and on the side of each was an arrow, pointing the way into the tunnel-branch he and
(Belch and Victor)
his unseen friends were to take. And it was the right path, oh yes: he could hear the others ahead, their splashing progress echoing back, the distorted murmurs of their voices. They were getting closer, catching up. And when they did… Tom looked down and saw that he still had the switchknife in his hand.
For a moment he was frightened-this was like one of those crazy astral experiences he sometimes read about in the weekly tabloids, when your spirit left your body and entered someone else’s. The shape of his body felt different to him, as if he were not Tom but
(Henry)
someone else, someone younger. He began to fight his way out of the dream, panicked, and then a voice was talking to him, a soothing voice, whispering in his ear: It doesn’t matter when this is, and it doesn’t matter who you are. What matters is that Beverly is up there, she’s with them, my good friend, and do you know what? She’s been doing something one hell of a lot worse than sneaking smokes. You know what? She’s been fucking her old friend Bill Denbrough! Yes indeed! She and that stuttering freak, going right at it! They-
That’s a lie! he tried to scream. She wouldn’t dare!
But he knew it was no lie. She had used a belt on his
(kicked me in the)
balls and run off and she now had cheated on him, the slutty
(child)
little roundheels bitch had actually cheated on him, and oh dear friends, oh good neighbors, she was going to get the whuppin of all whuppins-first her and then Denbrough, her novel-writing friend. And anyone who tried to get in his way, you could count them in for a piece of the action, too.
He stepped up his pace, although the breath was already whistling in and out of his throat. Up ahead he could see another luminous circle bobbing in the darkness-another Moon-Balloon. He could hear the voices of the people ahead of him, and the fact that they were childish voices no longer bothered him. It was as the voice said: it didn’t matter where, when or who. Beverly was up there, and oh dear friends, oh good neighbors -
’Come on, you guys, move your asses,” he said, and it didn’t even matter that his voice wasn’t his own but the voice of a boy.
Then, as they approached the Moon-Balloon, he looked around and saw his companions for the first time. Both of them were dead. One was headless. The face of the other had been split open, as if by a great talon.
“We’re moving as fast as we can, Henry,” the boy with the split face said, and his lips moved in two pieces, grotesquely out of sync with each other, and that was when Tom shrieked the dream to pieces and came back to himself, tottering on the brink of what felt like some great empty space.
He struggled to keep his balance, lost it, and tumbled to the floor. The floor was carpeted but the fall still sent a sickening burst of pain through his hurt knee and he Stifled another cry against his forearm.
Where am I? Where the fuck am I?
He became aware of a faint but clear white light, and for a frightening moment he thought he was back in the dream again, that it was light cast by one of those crazy balloons. Then he remembered leaving the bathroom door partially open and the fluorescent light in there on. He always left the light on when staying in a strange place; it saved you barking your shins if you had to get up in the night to pee.
That clicked reality into place. It had been a dream, all some crazy dream. He was in a Holiday Inn. This was Derry, Maine. He had chased his wife here, and, in the middle of a crazy nightmare, he had fallen out of bed. That was all; that was the long and the short of it.
That wasn’t just a nightmare.
He jumped as if the words had been spoken beside his ear instead of inside his own mind. It didn’t seem like his own interior voice at all-it was cold, alien… but somehow hypnotic and believable.
He got up slowly, fumbled a glass of water off the table beside the bed, and drank it down. He ran shaky hands through his hair. The clock on the table said ten past three.
Go back to sleep. Wait until morning.
That alien voice answered: But there will be people around in the morning-too many people. And besides, you can beat them down there this time. This time you can be first.
Down there? He thought of his dream: the water, the dripping dark.
The light suddenly seemed brighter. He turned his head, not wanting to but helpless to stop. A groan slipped out of his mouth. A balloon was tied to the knob of the bathroom door. It floated at the end of a string about three feet long. The balloon glowed, full of a ghostly white light; it looked like a will-o-the-wisp glimpsed in a swamp, floating dreamily between trees overhung with gray ropes of
