'W-W-We dih-dih-dih-didn't beat It,' Bill said grimly. 'We got l-l-lucky. Let's g-get out b-b-before Ih-Ih-It d-d-decides to come buh-back.'
'Where?' Mike asked.
'The Buh-Buh-Barrens,' Bill said.
Beverly made her way over to them, still holding her blouse closed. Her cheeks were bright red. 'The clubhouse?'
Bill nodded.
'Can I have someone's shirt?' Beverly asked, blushing more furiously than ever. Bill glanced down at her, and the blood came into his own face, all in a rush. He turned his eyes away hastily, but in that instant Ben felt a rush of knowledge and dismal momentary jealousy. In that instant, that one bare second, Bill had become aware of her in a way that only Ben had himself been before.
The others had also looked and then looked away. Richie coughed against the back of his hand. Stan turned red. And Mike Hanlon dropped back a step or two as if actually frightened by the sideswell of that one small white breast, visible below her hand.
Beverly threw her head up, shaking her tangled hair back behind her. She was still blushing, but her face was lovely.
'I can't help it that I'm a girl,' she said, 'or that I'm starting to get big on top . . . now can't I please have someone's shirt?'
'Sh-sh-sure,' Bill said. He pulled his white t-shirt over his head, baring his narrow chest, the visible rack of his ribs, his sunburned, freckled shoulders. 'H-H-Here.'
'Thank you, Bill,' she said, and for one hot, smoking moment their eyes locked directly. Bill did not look away this time. His gaze was firm, adult.
'W-W-W-Welcome,' he said.
Good luck, Big Bill, Ben thought, and he turned away from that gaze. It was hurting him, hurting him in a deeper place than any Vampire or Werewolf would ever be able to reach. But all the same, there was such a thing as propriety. The word he didn't know; on the concept he was very clear. Looking at them when they were looking at each other that way would be as wrong as looking at her breasts when she let go of the front of her blouse to pull Bill's t-shirt over her head. If that's the way it is. But you'll never love her the way I do. Never.
Bill's t-shirt came down almost to her knees. If not for the jeans poking out from beneath its hem, she would have looked as if she was wearing a slip.
'L-L-Let's guh-guh-go,' Bill repeated. 'I duh-don't nun-know about you g-guys, but I've h-h-had ee-ee-enough for wuh-wuh-one d-day.'
Turned out they all had.
11
The passage of an hour found them in the clubhouse, both the window and the trapdoor open. It was cool inside, and the Barrens were blessedly silent that day. They sat without talking much, each lost in his or her own thoughts. Richie and Bev passed a Marlboro back and forth. Eddie took a brief snort from his aspirator. Mike sneezed several times and apologized. He said he was catching a cold.
'Thass the oney theeng you could catch, senhorr,' Richie said, companionably enough, and that was all.
Ben kept expecting the mad interlude in the house on Neibolt Street to take on the hues of a dream. It'll recede and fall apart, he thought, the way that bad dreams do. You wake up gasping and sweating all over, but fifteen minutes later you can't remember what the dream was even about.
But that didn't happen. Everything that had happened, from the time he had forced his way in through the cellar window to the moment Bill had used the chair in the kitchen to break a window so they could get out, remained bright and clearly fixed in his memory. It had not been a dream. The clotted wound on his chest and belly was not a dream, and it didn't matter if his mom could see it or not.
At last Beverly stood up. 'I have to go home,' she said. 'I want to change before my mom gets home. If she sees me wearing a boy's shirt, she'll kill me.'
'Keel you, senhorrita,' Richie agreed, 'but she will keel you slow.'
'Beep-beep, Richie.'
Bill was looking at her gravely.
'I'll return your shirt, Bill.'
He nodded and waved a hand to show that this wasn't important.
'Will you get in trouble? Coming home without it?'
'N-No. They h-h-hardly nuh-hotice when I'm a-a-around, anyway.'
She nodded, bit her full underlip, a girl of eleven who was tall for her age and simply beautiful.
'What happens next, Bill?'
'I d-d-don't nuh-nuh-know.'
'It's not over, is it?'
Bill shook his head.
Ben said, 'It'll want us more than ever now.'
'More silver slugs?' she asked him. He found he could barely stand to meet her glance. I love you, Beverly . . . just let me have that. You can have Bill, or the world, or whatever you need. Just let me have that, let me go on loving you, and I guess it'll be enough.
'I don't know,' Ben said. 'We could, but . . . ' He trailed off vaguely, shrugged. He could not say what he felt, was somehow not able to bring it out - that this was like being in a monster movie, but it wasn't. The Mummy had looked different in some ways . . . ways that confirmed its essential reality. The same was true of the Werewolf - he could testify to that because he had seen it in a paralyzing close-up no film, not even one in 3-D, allowed, he had had his hands in the wiry underbrush of Its tangled pelt, he had seen a small, baleful-orange firespot (like a pompom!) in one of Its green eyes. These things were . . . well . . . they were dreams-made-real. And once dreams became real, they escaped the power of the dreamer and became their own deadly things, capable of independent action. The silver slugs had worked because the seven of them had been unified in their belief that they would. But they hadn't killed It. And next time It would approach them in a new shape, one over which silver wielded no power.
Power, power, Ben thought, looking at Beverly. It was okay now; her eyes had met Bill's again and they were looking at each other as if lost. It was only for a moment, but to Ben it seemed very long.
It always comes back to power. I love Beverly Marsh and she has power over me. She loves Bill Denbrough and so he has power over her. But - I think - he is coming to love her. Maybe it was her face, how it looked when she said she couldn't help being a girl. Maybe it was seeing one breast for just a second. Maybe just the way she looks sometimes when the light is right, or her eyes. Doesn't matter. But if he's starting to love her, she's starting to have power over him. Superman has power, except when there's Kryptonite around. Batman has power, even though he can't fly or see through walls. My mom has power over me, and her boss down in the mill has power over her. Everyone has some . . . except maybe for link kids and babies.
Then he thought that even little kids and babies had power; they could cry until you had to do something to shut them up.
'Ben?' Beverly asked, looking back at him. 'Cat got your tongue?'
'Huh? No. I was thinking about power. The power of the slugs.'
Bill was looking at him closely.
'I was wondering where that power came from,' Ben said.
'Ih-Ih-It - ' Bill began, and then shut his mouth. A thoughtful, vague expression drifted over his face.
'I really have to go,' Beverly said. 'I'll see you all, huh?'
'Sure, come on down tomorrow,' Stan said. 'We're going to break Eddie's other arm.'
They all laughed. Eddie pretended to throw his aspirator at Stan.
'Bye, then,' Beverly said, and boosted herself up and out.
Ben looked at Bill and saw that he hadn't joined in the laughter. That thoughtful expression was still on his face, and Ben knew you would have to call his name two or three times before he would answer. He knew what Bill was thinking about; he would be thinking about it himself in the days ahead. Not all the time, no. There would be clothes to hang out and take in for his mother, games of tag and guns in the Barrens, and, during a rainy spell the first four days of August, the seven of them would go on a mad Parcheesi jag at Richie Tozier's house, making blockades, sending each other back with great abandon, deliberating exactly how to split the roll of the dice while rain dripped and ran outside. His mother would announce to him that she believed Pat Nixon was the prettiest woman in America, and be horror-struck when Ben opted for Marilyn Monroe (except for the color of her hair, he thought that Bev looked like Marilyn Monroe). There would be time to eat as many Twinkies and Ring-Dings and Devil Dogs as he could get his hands on, and time to sit on the back porch reading Lucky Starr and the Moons of Mercury. There would be time for all of those things while the wound on his chest and belly healed to a scab and began to itch, because life went on and at eleven, although bright and apt, he held no real sense of perspective. He could live with what had happened in the house on Neibolt Street. The world was, after all, full of wonders.