5
They weren't inside anymore.
The two of them were standing together in the middle of the Barrens, and it was nearly dusk.
It was the Barrens, he knew that, but everything was different. The foliage was lusher, deeper, savagely fragrant. There were plants he had never seen before, and Richie realized some of the things he had first taken for trees were really giant ferns. There was the sound of running water, but it was much louder than it should have been - this water sounded not like the leisurely flow of the Kenduskeag Stream but more the way he imagined the Colorado River would sound as it cut its way through the Grand Canyon.
It was hot, too. Not that it didn't get hot in Maine during the summer, and humid enough so that sometimes you felt sticky just lying in your bed at night, but this was more heat and more humidity than he had ever felt in his whole life. A low mist, smoky and thick, lay in the hollows of the land and crept around the boys' legs. It had a thin acrid smell like burning green wood.
He and Mike began to move toward the sound of the running water without speaking, pushing their way through the strange foliage. Thick ropy lianas lay between some of the trees like spidery hammocks, and once Richie heard something go crashing off through the underbrush. It sounded bigger than a deer.
He stopped long enough to look around, turning in a circle, studying the horizon. He knew where the Standpipe's thick white cylinder should have been, but it wasn't there. Neither was the railroad trestle going over to the trainyards at the end of Neibolt Street or the Old Cape housing development - low bluffs and red sandstone outcroppings of rock bulged out of thick stands of giant fern and pine trees where the Old Cape should have been.
There was a flapping noise overhead. The boys ducked as a squadron of bats flapped by. They were the biggest bats Richie had ever seen, and for a moment he was more terrified than he had been even when Bill was trying to get Silver rolling and he had heard the werewolf closing in on them from behind. The stillness and the alienness of this land were both terrible, but its awful familiarity was somehow worse.
No need to be scared, he told himself. Remember that this is just a dream, or a vision, or whatever you want to call it. Me and ole Mikey are really back in the clubhouse, goofed up on smoke. Pretty soon Big Bill is gonna get noivous from the soivice because we're not answering anymore, and he and Ben will come down and haul us out. It's just like Conway Twitty says - only make-believe.
But he could see how one of the bats' wings was so ragged the hazy sun shone through it, and when they passed beneath one of the giant ferns he could see a fat yellow caterpillar trundling across a wide green frond, leaving its shadow behind it. There were tiny black mites jumping and sizzling on the caterpillar's body. If this was a dream, it was the clearest one he had ever had.
They went on toward the sound of the water, and in the thick knee-high groundmist, Richie was unable to tell if his feet were touching the ground or not. They came to a place where both the mist and the ground stopped. Richie looked, unbelieving. This was not the Kenduskeag - and yet it was. The stream boiled and roiled through a narrow watercourse cut through that same crumbly rock - looking across to the far side, he could see ages cut into those stacked layers of stone, red and then orange and then red again. You couldn't walk across this stream on stepping-stones; you'd need a rope bridge, and if you fell in you would be swept away at once. The sound of the water was the sound of bitter foolish anger, and as Richie watched, slack-jawed, he saw a pinkish-silver fish jump in an impossibly high arc, snapping at the bugs that made shifting clouds just above the surface of the water. It splashed down again, giving Richie just time enough to register its presence, and to realize he had never seen a fish exactly like that in his whole life, not even in a book.
Birds flocked across the sky, squalling harshly. Not a dozen or two dozen; for a moment the sky was so dark with birds that they blotted out the sun. Something else crashed through the bushes, and then more things. Richie wheeled, his heart thudding painfully in his chest, and saw something that looked like an antelope flash by, heading southeast.
Something's going to happen. And they know it.
The birds passed, presumably alighting somewhere en masse farther south. Another animal crashed by them . . . and another. Then there was silence except for the steady rumble of the Kenduskeag. The silence had a waiting quality about it, a pregnant quality Richie didn't like. He felt the hairs shifting and trying to stand up on the back of his neck and he groped for Mike's hand again.
Do you know where we are? he shouted at Mike. You got the word? Jesus, yes! Mike shouted back. I got it! This is ago, Richie! Ago!
Richie nodded. Ago, as in once upon a time, long long ago, when we all lived in the forest and nobody lived anywhere else. They were in the Barrens as they had been God knew how many thousands of years ago. They were in some unimaginable past before the ice age, when New England had been as tropical as South America was today . . . if there still was a today. He looked around again, nervously, almost expecting to see a brontosaurus raise its cranelike neck against the sky and stare down at them, its mouth full of mud and dripping uprooted plants, or a saber-toothed tiger come stalking out of the undergrowth.
But there was only that silence, as in the five or ten minutes before a vicious thundersquall strikes, when the purple heads stack up and up in the sky overhead and the light turns a queer, bruised purple-yellow and the wind dies completely and you can smell a thick aroma like overcharged car batteries in the air.
We're in the ago, a million years back, maybe, or ten million, or eighty million, but here we are and something's going to happen, I don't know what but something and I'm scared I want it to end I want to be back and Bill please Bill please pull us out it's like we fell into the picture some picture please please help -
Mike's hand tightened on his and he realized that now the silence had been broken. There was a steady low vibration - he could feel it more than hear it, working against the tight flesh of his eardrums, buzzing the tiny bones that conducted the sound. It grew steadily. It had no tone; it simply was:
(the word in the beginning was the word the world the)
a tuneless, soulless sound. He groped for the tree they stood near and as his hand touched it, cupped the curve of the bole, he could feel the vibration caught inside. At the same moment he realized he could feel it in his feet, a steady tingling that went up his ankles and calves to his knees, turning his tendons into tuning forks.
It grew. And grew.
It was coming out of the sky. Not wanting to but unable to help himself, Richie turned his face up. The sun was a molten coin burning a circle in the low-hanging overcast, surrounded by a fairy-ring of moisture. Below it, the verdant green slash that was the Barrens lay utterly still. Richie thought he understood what this vision was: they were about to see the coming of It.
The vibration took on a voice - a rumbling roar that built to a shattering crescendo of sound. He clapped his hands to his ears and screamed and could not hear himself scream. Beside him, Mike Hanlon was doing the same, and Richie saw that Mike's nose was bleeding a little.
The clouds in the west lit with a bloom of red fire. It traced its way toward them, widening from an artery to a stream to a river of ominous color; and then, as a burning, falling object broke through the cloud cover, the wind came. It was hot and searing, smoky and suffocating. The thing in the sky was gigantic, a flaming match-head that was nearly too bright to look at. Arcs of electricity bolted from it, blue bullwhips that flashed out from it and left thunder in their wake.