He saw Stan's panic leap from one of them to the next to the next - like a grassfire driven by a hot wind, it widened in Eddie's eyes, dropped Bev's mouth into a wounded gasp, made Richie push his glasses up with both hands and stare around as if followed from close behind by a fiend.
They trembled on the brink of flight, Bill's warning to stay together almost forgotten. They were listening to gale-force panicwinds blowing between their ears. As if in a dream Ben heard Miss Davies, the assistant librarian, reading to the little ones: Who is that trip-trapping on my bridge? And he saw them, the little ones, the babies, leaning forward, their faces still and solemn, their eyes reflecting the eternal fascination of the fairy-story: would the monster be bested . . . or would It feed?
'I don't have anything!' Stan Uris wailed, and he seemed very small, almost small enough to slip through one of the cracks in the hallway's plank flooring like a human letter. 'You got your brother, man, but I don't have anything?
'You duh-duh-duh-do!' Bill yelled back. He grabbed Stan and Ben felt sure he was going to bust him one and his thoughts moaned, No, Bill, please, that's Henry's way, if you do that It'll kill us all right now!
But Bill didn't hit Stan. He whirled him around with rough hands and tore the paperback from the back pocket of Stan's jeans.
'Gimme it!' Stan screamed, beginning to cry. The others stood stunned, shrinking away from Bill, whose eyes now seemed to actually burn. His forehead glowed like a lamp, and he held the book out to Stan like a priest holding out a cross to ward off a vampire.
'You guh-guh-got your b-b-bi-bir-bir -
He turned his head up, the cords in his neck standing out like cables, his adam's apple like an arrowhead buried in his throat. Ben was filled with both fear and pity for his friend Bill Denbrough; but there was also a strong sense of wonderful relief. Had he doubted Bill? Had any of them? Oh Bill, say it, please, can't you say it?
And somehow, Bill did. 'You got your BUH-BUH-BUH-BIRDS! Your BUH-BUH-BIRDS!'
He thrust the book at Stan. Stan took it, and looked at Bill dumbly. Tears glimmered on his cheeks. He held the book so tightly that his fingers were white. Bill looked at him, then at the others.
'Cuh-cuh-home on,' he said again.
'Will the birds work?' Stan asked. His voice was low, husky.
They worked in the Standpipe, didn't they?' Bev asked him.
Stan looked at her uncertainly.
Richie clapped him on the shoulder. 'Come on, Stan-kid,' he said. 'Is you a man or is you a mouse?'
'I must be a man,' Stan said shakily, and wiped tears from his face with the heel of his left hand. 'So far as I know, mice don't shit their pants.'
They laughed and Ben could have sworn he felt the house pulling away from them, from that sound. Mike turned. 'That big room. The one we just came through. Look!'
They looked. The parlor was now almost black. It was not smoke, nor any kind of gas; it was just blackness, a nearly solid blackness. The air had been robbed of its light. The blackness seemed to roll and flex as they stared into it, to almost coalesce into faces.
'Come oh-oh-on.'
They turned away from the black and walked down the hall. Three doors opened off it, two with dirty white porcelain doorknobs, the third with only a hole where the knob's shaft had been. Bill grabbed the first knob, turned it, and pushed the door open. Bev crowded up next to him, raising the Bullseye.
Ben drew back, aware that the others were doing the same, crowding behind Bill like frightened quail. It was a bedroom, empty save for one stained mattress. The rusty ghosts of the coils in a box-spring long departed were tattooed into the mattress's yellow hide. Outside the room's one window, sunflowers dipped and nodded.
'There's nothing - ' Bill began, and then the mattress began to bulge in and out rhythmically. It suddenly ripped straight down the middle. A black sticky fluid began to spill out, staining the mattress and then running over the floor toward the doorway. It came in long ropy tendrils.
'Shut it, Bill!' Richie shouted. 'Shut the fuckin door!'
Bill slammed it shut, looked around at them, and nodded. 'Come on.' He had barely touched the knob of the second door - this one on the other side of the narrow hall - when the buzzing scream began behind the cheap wood.
9
Even Bill drew back from that rising, inhuman cry. Ben felt the sound might drive him mad; his mind visualized a giant cricket behind the door, like something from a movie where radiation made all the bugs get big - The Beginning of the End, maybe, or The Black Scorpion, or that one about the ants in the Los Angeles stormdrains. He could not have run even if that buzzing rugose horror had splintered the panels of the door and begun caressing him with its great hairy legs. Beside him, he was dimly aware that Eddie was breathing in hacking gasps.
The scream rose in pitch, never losing that buzzing, insectile quality. Bill
fell back another step, no blood in his face now, his eyes bulging, his lips only
a purple scar below his nose.
'Shoot it, Beverly!' Ben heard himself cry. 'Shoot it through the door, shoot it before it can get us!' And the sun fell through the dirty window at the end of the hall, a heavy feverish weight.
Beverly raised the Bullseye like a girl in a dream as the buzzing scream rose louder, louder, louder -
But before she could pull the sling back, Mike was shouting: 'No! No! Don't, Bev! Oh gosh! I'll be dipped!' And incredibly, Mike was laughing. He pushed forward, grabbed the knob, turned it, and shoved the door open. It came free of the swollen jamb with a brief grinding noise. 'It's a mooseblower! Just a mooseblower, that's all, something to scare the crows!'
The room was an empty box. Lying on the floor was a Sterno can with both ends cut off. In the middle, strung tight and knotted outside holes punched in the can's sides, was a waxed length of string. Although there was no breeze in the room - the one window was shut and indifferently boarded over, letting light pass only in chinks and rays - there could be no doubt that the buzzing was coming from the can.
Mike walked to it and fetched it a solid kick. The buzzing stopped as the can tumbled into a far corner.
'Just a mooseblower,' he said to the others, as if apologizing. 'We put cm on the scarecrows. It's nothing. Only a cheap trick. But I ain't a crow.' He looked at Bill, not laughing anymore but smiling still. 'I'm still scared of It - I guess we all are - but It's scared of us, too. Tell you the truth, I think It's scared pretty bad.'
Bill nodded. 'I-I do, too,' he said.
They went down to the door at the end of the hall, and as Ben watched Bill hook his finger into the hole where the doorknob's shaft had been, he understood that this was where it was going to end; there would be no trick behind this door. The smell was worse now, and that thundery feeling of two opposing powers swirling around them was much stronger. He glanced at Eddie, one arm in a sling, his good hand clutching his aspirator. He looked at Bev on his other side, white-faced, holding the slingshot up like a wishbone. He thought: If we have to run, I'll try to protect you, Beverly. I swear I'll try.
She might have heard his thought, because she turned toward him and offered him a strained smile. Ben smiled back.
Bill pulled the door open. Its hinges uttered a dull scream and then were silent. It was a bathroom . . . but something was wrong with it. Someone broke something in here was all that Ben could make out at first. Not a booze bottle . . . what?
White chips and shards, glimmering wickedly, lay strewn everywhere. Then he understood. It was the crowning insanity. He laughed. Richie joined him.