butt, got up, and threw a terrified glance back over his shoulder. One of the bar windows blew out with a loud shooting-gallery sound. Whickers of broken glass whistled all around Vince’s head. A moment later the other window exploded. Once again he was miraculously untouched… but he decided on the spur of the moment that the time had come to see his sister up Eastport. He started off at once, and his journey to the Derry town limits and beyond would make a saga in itself… but suffice it to say that he did eventually get out of town. Others were not so lucky. Aloysius Nell, who had turned seventy-seven not long since, was sitting with his wife in the parlor of their home on Strapham Street, watching the storm pound Derry. At 7:32, he suffered a fatal stroke. His wife told her brother a week later that Aloysius dropped his coffee cup on the rug, sat bolt-upright, his eyes wide and staring, and screamed: “Here, here, me foine girl! Just what in the hell do ye think ye’re doin? Belay that guff before I snatch yer pettiskimr-” Then he fell out of his chair, smashing his coffee cup under him. Maureen Nell, who knew well how bad his ticker had been for the last three years, understood immediately that all was over with him, and after loosening his collar she had run for the telephone to call Father McDowell. But the phone was out of order. A funny noise like a police siren was all it would make. And so, although she knew it was probably a blasphemy she would have to answer for to Saint Peter, she had attempted to give him the last rites herself. She felt confident, she told her brother, that God would understand even if Saint Peter didn’t. Aloysius had been a good husband and a good man, and if he drank too much, that was only the Irish in him coming out. At 7:49 a series of explosions shook the Derry Mall, which stood on the site of the defunct Kitchener Ironworks. No one was killed; the mall didn’t open until 10:00, and the five-man janitorial squad hadn’t been due to arrive until 8:00 (and on such a morning as this, very few of them would have shown up anyway). A team of investigators later dismissed the idea of sabotage. They suggested-rather vaguely-that the explosions had probably been caused by water which had seeped into the mall’s electrical system. Whatever the reason, no one was going to go shopping at the Derry Mall for a long time. One explosion totally wiped out Zale’s Jewelry Store. Diamond rings, ID bracelets, strings of pearls, trays of wedding rings, and Seiko digital watches flew everywhere in a hail of bright, sparkly trinkets. A music-box flew the length of the east corridor and landed in the fountain outside of the J. C. Penney’s, where it briefly played a bubbly rendition of the theme from Love Story before shutting down. The same blast tore a hole through the Baskin-Robbins next door, turning the thirty-one flavors into ice-cream soup that ran away along the floor in cloudy runnels. The blast which tore through Sears lifted off a chunk of the roof and the rising wind sailed it away like a kite; it came down a thousand yards away, slicing cleanly through the silo of a farmer named Brent Kilgallon. Kilgallon’s sixteen-year-old son rushed out with his mother’s Kodak and took a picture. The National Enquirer bought it for sixty dollars, which the boy used to buy two new tires for his Yamaha motorcycle. A third explosion ripped through Hit or Miss, sending flaming skirts, jeans, and underwear out into the flooded parking-lot. And a final explosion tore open the mall branch of the Derry Farmers” Trust like a rotted box of crackers. A chunk of the bank’s roof was also torn off. Burglar alarms went off with a bray that would not be silenced until the security system’s independent wiring hookup was shorted out four hours later. Loan contracts, banking instruments, deposit slips, cash-drawer chits, and Money-Manager forms were lifted into the sky and blown away by the rising wind. And money: tens and twenties mostly, with a generous helping of fives and a soupcon of fifties and hundreds. Better than $75,000 blew away, according to the bank’s officers… Later, after a mass shakeup in the bank’s executive structure (and an FSLIC bail-out), some would admit-strictly off the record, of course-that it had been more like $200,000. A woman in Haven Village named Rebecca Paulson found a fifty-dollar bill fluttering from her back-door welcome mat, two twenties in her bird-house, and a hundred plastered against an oak tree in her back yard. She and her husband used the money to make an extra two payments on their Bombardier Skidoo. Dr Hale, a retired doctor who had lived on West Broadway for nearly fifty years, was killed at 8:00 A.M. Dr Hale liked to boast that he had taken the same two-mile walk from his West Broadway home and around Derry Park and the Elementary School for the last twenty-five of those fifty years. Nothing stopped him; not rain, sleet, hail, howling nor’easters, or subzero cold. He set out on the morning of May 31st in spite of his housekeeper’s worried fussings. His exit-line from the world, spoken back over his shoulder as he went through the front door, pulling his hat firmly down to his ears, was: “don’t be so goddamned silly, Hilda. This is nothing but a capful of rain. You should have seen it in ’57! That was a storm!” As Dr Hale turned back onto West Broadway, a manhole cover in front of the Mueller place suddenly lifted off like the pay load of a Redstone rocket. It decapitated the good doctor so quickly and neatly that he walked on another three steps before collapsing, dead, on the sidewalk. And the wind continued to rise.
7
UNDER THE CITY / 4:15 P.M.
Eddie led them through the darkened tunnels for an hour, perhaps an hour and a half, before admitting, in a tone that was more bewildered than frightened, that for the first time in his life he was lost.
They could still hear the dim thunder of water in the drains, but the acoustics of all of these tunnels was so crazed that it was impossible to tell if the water-sounds were coming from ahead or behind, left or right, above or below. Their matches were gone. They were lost in the dark.
Bill was scared… plenty scared. The conversation he’d had with his father in his father’s shop kept coming back to him. There’s nine pounds of blueprints that just disappeared somewhere along the line… My point is that nobody knows where all the damned sewers and drains go, or why. When they work, nobody cares. When they don’t, there’s three or four sad sacks from Derry Water who have to try and find out which pump went flooey or where the plug-up is… It’s dark and smelly and there are rats. Those are all good reasons to stay out, but the best reason is that you could get lost. It’s happened before.
Happened before. Happened before. It’s happened-
Sure it had. There was that bundle of bones and polished cotton they had passed on the way to Its lair, for instance.
Bill felt panic trying to rise and pushed it back. It went, but not easily. He could feel it back there, a live thing, struggling and twisting, trying to get out. Adding to it was the nagging unanswerable question of whether they had killed It or not. Richie said yes, Mike said yes, so did Eddie. But he hadn’t liked the frightened doubtful look on Bev’s face, or on Stan’s, as the light died and they crawled back through the small door, away from the susurating collapsing web.
“So what do we do now?” Stan asked. Bill heard the frightened, little-boy tremble in Stan’s voice and knew the question was aimed directly at him.
“Yeah,” Ben said. “What? Damn, I wish we had a flashlight… or even a can… candle.” Bill thought he heard a stifled sob in the second ellipsis. It frightened him more than anything else. Ben would have been astounded to know it, but Bill thought the fat boy tough and resourceful, steadier than Richie and less apt to cave in suddenly than Stan. If Ben was getting ready to crack, they were on the edge of very bad trouble. It was not the skeleton of the Water Department guy to which Bill’s own mind kept returning but to Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher, lost in McDougal’s Cave. He would push the thought away and then it would come stealing back.
Something else was troubling him, but the concept was too large and too vague for his tired boy’s mind to grasp. Perhaps it was the very simplicity of the idea that made it elusive: they were falling away from each other. The bond that had held them all this long summer was dissolving. It had been faced and vanquished. It might be dead, as Richie and Eddie thought, or It might be wounded so badly It would sleep for a hundred years, or a thousand, or ten thousand. They had faced It, seen It with Its final mask laid aside, and It had been horrible enough-oh, for sure!-but once seen, Its physical form was not so bad and Its most potent weapon was taken away from It. They all had, after all, seen spiders before. They were alien and somehow crawlingly dreadful, and he supposed that none of them would ever be able to see another one
(if we ever get out of this)
without feeling a shudder of revulsion. But a spider was, after all, only a spider. Perhaps at the end, when the masks of horror were laid aside, there was nothing with which the human mind could not cope. That was a heartening thought. Anything except
(the deadlights)
whatever had been out there, but perhaps even that unspeakable living light which crouched at the doorway to the macroverse was dead or dying. The deadlights, and the trip into the black to the place where they had been, was already growing hazy and hard to recall in his mind. And that wasn’t really the point. The point, felt but not grasped, was simply that the fellowship was ending… it was ending and they were still in the dark. That Other had through their friendship, perhaps been able to make them something more than children. But they were becoming children again. Bill felt it as much as the others.
“What now, Bill?” Richie asked, finally saying it right out.
“I d-d-don’t nuh-nuh-know,” Bill said. His stutter was back, alive and well. He heard it, they heard it, and he stood in the dark, smelling the sodden aroma of their growing panic, wondering how long it would be before somebody-Stan, most likely it would be Stan-tore things wide open by saying: Well, why don’t you know? You got us into this!
“And what about Henry?” Mike asked uneasily. “Is he still out there, or what?”
“Oh, Jeez,” Eddie said… almost moaned. “I forgot about him. Sure he is, sure he is, he’s probably as lost as we are and we could run into him any time… Jeez, Bill, don’t you have any ideas? Your dad works down here! Don’t you have any ideas at all?”
Bill listened to the distant mocking thunder of the water and tried to have the idea that Eddie-all of them-had a right to demand. Because yes, correct, he had gotten them into this and it was his responsibility to get them back out again. Nothing came. Nothing.
“I have an idea,” Beverly said quietly.
In the dark, Bill heard a sound he could not immediately place. A whispery little sound, but not scary. Then there was a more easily placed sound… a zipper. What-? he thought, and then he realized what. She was undressing. For some reason, Beverly was undressing.
“What are you doing? Richie asked, and his shocked voice cracked on the last word.
“I know something,” Beverly said in the dark, and to Bill her voice sounded older. “I know because my father told me. I know how to bring us back together. And if we’re not together we’ll never get out.”
“What?” Ben asked, sounding bewildered and terrified. “What are you talking about?”
“Something that will bring us together forever. Something that will show-”
“Nuh-Nuh-No, B-B-Beverly!” Bill said, suddenly understanding, understanding everything.
“-that will show that I love you all,” Beverly said, “that you’re all my friends.”
“What’s she t-” Mike began.
Calmly, Beverly cut across his words. “Who’s first?” she asked. “I think
8
IN THE LAIR OF IT / 1985
he’s dying,” Beverly wept. “His arm, It ate his arm-She reached for Bill, clung to him, and Bill shook her off.
“It’s getting away again!” he roared at her. Blood caked his lips and chin. “Cuh-Cuh-Come on! Richie! B-B-Ben! This tuh-time we’re g-g-going to fuh-hinish her!”
Richie turned Bill toward him, looked at him as you would look at a man who is hopelessly raving. “Bill, we have to take care of Eddie. We have to get a tourniquet on him, get him out of here.”
But Beverly was now sitting with Eddie’s head in her lap, cradling him. She had closed his eyes. “Go with Bill,” she said. “If you let him die for nothing. if It comes back in another twenty-five years, or fifty, or even two thousand, I swear I’ll… I’ll haunt your ghosts. Go!”
Richie looked at her for a moment, indecisive. Then he became aware that her face was losing definition, becoming not a face but a pale shape in the growing shadows. The light was fading. It
