12
“Now,” Mark Lamonica said in a low voice. He sighed-the sigh of a man who feels orgasm approaching.
Mike pushed the call-button in his hands again and again. He could hear it ringing at the nurses” station down the hall, but no one came. With a kind of hellish second sight he understood that the nurses were sitting around down there, reading the morning paper, drinking coffee, hearing his call-bell but not hearing it, hearing but not responding, they would respond only later when it was all over, because that was how things worked in Derry. In Derry some things were better not seen or heard… until they were over.
Mike let the call-button fall from his hands.
Mark bent toward him, the tip of the syringe glittering. His Saint Christopher medal swung hypnotically back and forth as he drew the sheet down.
“Right there,” he whispered. The sternum.” And sighed again.
Mike suddenly felt power wash into him-some primitive power that crammed his body like volts. He stiffened, fingers splaying out as if in a convulsion. His eyes widened. A grunt jerked out of him, and that sense of dreadful paralysis was driven from him as if by a roundhouse slap.
His right hand pistoned out toward the nighttable. There was a plastic pitcher there and a heavy cafeteria-style water-glass beside it. His hand closed around the glass. Lamonica sensed the change; that dreamy, pleased light disappeared from his eyes and was replaced by wary confusion. He drew back a bit, and then Mike brought the glass up and smashed it into his face.
Lamonica screamed and staggered backward, dropping the syringe. His hands went to his spouting face; blood ran down his wrists and splashed on his white tunic.
The power left as suddenly as it had come. Mike looked dully at the shards of broken glass on the bed and his hospital johnny and his own bleeding hand. He heard the quick, light sound of crepe-soled shoes in the hall, approaching.
Now they come, he thought, Oh yes, now. And after they’re gone, who’ll show
up? Who’ll show up next?
As they burst into his room, the nurses who had sat calmly on station as his call-bell rang frantically, Mike closed his eyes and prayed for it to be over. He prayed his friends were somewhere under the city, he prayed they were all right, he prayed they would end it.
He didn’t know exactly Who he prayed to… but he prayed nonetheless.
13
UNDER THE CITY / 6:54 A.M.
“He’s a-a-all ruh-right,” Bill said presently.
Ben didn’t know how long they had stood in the darkness, holding hands. It seemed to him that he had felt something-something from them, from their circle-go out and then come back. But he did not know where that thing-if it existed at all-had gone, or done.
“Are you sure, Big Bill?” Richie asked.
“Y-Y-Yes.” Bill released Richie’s hand and Beverly’s. “But we h-have to finish this as kwuh-quick as we c-can. C-Come oh-oh-on.”
They went on, Richie or Bill periodically lighting matches. We don’t have so much as a pea-shooter among us, Ben thought. But that’s part of it, too, isn’t it? Chud. What does that mean? What was It, exactly? What was Its final face? And even if we didn’t kill It, we hurt It. How did we do that?
The chamber they walked through-it could no longer be called a tunnel-grew larger and larger. Their footfalls echoed. Ben remembered the smell, that thick zoo smell. He became aware that the matches were no longer necessary-there was light now, light of a sort: a ghastly effulgence that was growing steadily stronger. In that marshy light, his friends all looked like walking corpses.
“Wall up ahead, Bill,” Eddie said.
“I nuh-nuh-know.”
Ben felt his heart begin to pick up speed. There was a sour taste in his mouth and his head had begun to ache. He felt slow and frightened. He felt fat.
“The door,” Beverly whispered.
Yes, here it was. Once, twenty-seven years before, they had been able to pass through that door by doing no more than ducking their heads. Now they would have to duck-walk their way through, or crawl on hands and knees. They had grown; here was final proof, if final proof were needed.
The pulse-points in Ben’s neck and wrists felt hot and bloody; his heart had picked up a light and rapid flutter that was close to arrhythmia. Pigeon-pulse, he thought randomly, and licked his lips.
Bright greenish-yellow light flooded out from under the door; it shot through the ornate keyhole in a twisting shaft that looked almost thick enough to cut.
The mark was on the door, and again they all saw something different in that strange device. Beverly saw Tom’s face. Bill saw Audra’s severed head with blank eyes that stared at him in dreadful accusation. Eddie saw a grinning skull poised over two crossed bones, the symbol for poison. Richie saw the bearded face of a degenerate Paul Bunyan, eyes narrowed to killer’s slits. And Ben saw Henry Bowers.
“Bill, are we strong enough?” he asked. “Can we do this?”
“I duh-hon’t nuh-nuh-know,” Bill said.
“What if it’s locked?” Beverly asked in a small voice. Tom’s face mocked her.
“Ih-It’s not,” Bill said. “Pluh-haces like this are n-never luh-luh-locked.” He placed the tented fingers of his right hand on the door-he had to bend over to do it-and pushed. It swung open on a flood of sick yellow-green light. That zoo smell wafted out at them, the smell of the past become the present, horribly alive, obscenely vital.
Roll, wheel, Bill thought randomly, and looked around at them. Then he dropped to his hands and knees. Beverly followed, then Richie, then Eddie. Ben came last, his flesh crawling at the feel of the ancient grit on the floor. He passed through the portal, and as he straightened up in the weird glow of fire crawling up and down the dripping stone walls in snakes of light, the last memory socked home with the force of a psychic battering ram.
He cried out, staggering back, one hand going to his head, and his first incoherent thought was No wonder Stan committed suicide! Oh God, I wish I had! He saw the same expressions of stunned horror and dawning realization on the faces of the others as the last key turned in the last lock.
Then Beverly was shrieking, clinging to Bill, as It raced down the gossamer curtain of Its webbing, a nightmare Spider from beyond time and space, a Spider from beyond the fevered imaginings of whatever inmates may live in the deepest depths of hell.
No, Bill thought coldly, not a Spider either, not really, but this shape isn’t one It picked out of our minds; it’s just the closest our minds can come to
(the deadlights)
whatever It really is.
It was perhaps fifteen feet high and as black as a moonless night. Each of Its legs was as thick as a muscle-builder’s thigh. Its eyes were bright malevolent rubies, bulging from sockets filled with some dripping chromium-colored fluid. Its jagged mandibles opened and closed, opened and closed, dripping ribbons of foam. Frozen in an ecstasy of horror, tottering on the brink of utter lunacy, Ben observed with an eye-of-the-storm calm that this foam was alive; it struck the stinking stone-flagged floor and then began to writhe away into the cracks like protozoa.
But It’s something else, there’s some final shape, one that I can almost see the way you might see the shape of a man moving behind a movie screen while the show is on, some other shape, but I don’t want to see It, please God, don’t let me see It…
And it didn’t matter, did it? They were seeing what they were seeing, and Ben understood somehow that It was imprisoned in this final shape, the shape of the Spider, by their common unsought and unfathered vision. It was against this It that they would live or die.
The creature was squealing and mewling, and Ben became quite sure he was hearing sounds It made twice-in his head, and then, a split second later, in his ears. Telepathic, he thought, I’m reading Its mind. Its shadow was a squat egg that raced along the ancient wall of this keep that was Its lair. Its body was covered by coarse hair, and Ben saw that It was possessed of a stinger long enough to impale a man. A clear fluid dripped from its tip, and Ben saw that this was also alive; like the saliva, the poison writhed away into the cracks of the floor. Its stinger, yes… but below that, Its belly bulged grotesquely, almost dragging on the floor as It moved, now changing direction slightly, heading unerringly toward their leader, toward Big Bill.
That’s Its egg-sac, Ben thought, and his mind seemed to shriek at the implication. Whatever It is beyond what we see, this representation is at least symbolically correct: It’s female, and It’s pregnant… It was pregnant then and none of us knew except Stan, oh Jesus Christ YES, it was Stan, Stan, not Mike, Stan who understood, Stan who told us… That’s why we had to come back, no matter what, because It is female, It’s pregnant with some unimaginable spawn… and Its time has drawn close.
Incredibly, Bill Denbrough was stepping forward to meet It.
“Bill, no!” Beverly screamed.
“Stuh-Stuh-Stay b-b-back!” Bill shouted without looking around. And then Richie was running toward him, shouting his name, and Ben found his own legs in motion. He seemed to feel a phantom stomach swaying in front of him, and he welcomed the sensation. Got to become a child again, he thought incoherently. That’s the only way I can keep It from driving me crazy. Got to become a kid again… got to accept it. Somehow.
Running. Shouting Bill’s name. Vaguely aware that Eddie was running beside him, his broken arm flopping, the belt of the bath-robe Bill had cinched around it now trailing on the floor. Eddie had drawn his aspirator. He looked like a crazed malnourished gunslinger with some weird pistol.
Ben heard Bill bellow: “You k-k-killed my brother, you fuh-fuh-fucking BITCH!”
Then It was rearing up over Bill, burying Bill in Its shadow, Its legs pawing the air. Ben heard Its eager mewling, looked into Its timeless, evil red eyes… and for an instant did see the shape behind the shape: saw lights, saw an endless crawling hairy thing which was made of light and nothing else, orange light, dead light that mocked life.
The ritual began for the second time.
Chapter 22
THE RITUAL OF CHUD
