'I'm here, Bill.'
'D-Do y-you still ruh-remember which p-p-pipe?'
Eddie pointed past Victor and said: 'That the one. Looks pretty small, doesn't it?'
Bill nodded again. 'Can you do it? With your a-a-arm broken?'
'I can for you, Bill.'
Bill smiled: the weariest, most terrible smile Richie had ever seen. 'Tuh-hake us there, Eh-Eddie. Let's g-get it done.'
5
In the Tunnels / 4:55 A.M.
As he crawled, Bill reminded himself of the dropoff at the end of this pipe, but it still surprised him. At one moment his hands were shuffling along the crusted surface of the old pipe; at the next they were skating on air. He pitched forward and rolled instinctively, landing on his shoulder with a painful crunch.
'Be c-c-careful!' he heard himself shouting. 'Here's the druh-hopoff! Eh-Eh-Eddie?'
'Here!' One of Eddie's waving hands brushed across Bill's forehead. 'Can you help me out?'
He got his arms around Eddie and lifted him out, trying to be careful of the bad arm. Ben came next, then Bev, then Richie.
'You got any muh-muh-matches, Ruh-Richie?'
'I do,' Beverly said. Bill felt a hand touch his in the darkness and press a folder of matches into it. 'There's only eight or ten, but Ben's got more. From the room.'
Bill said, 'Did you keep them in your a-a-armpit, B-Bev?'
'Not this time,' she said, and put her arms around him in the dark. He hugged her tight, eyes closed, trying to take the comfort that she wanted so badly to give.
He released her gently and struck a match. The power of memory was great - they all looked at once to their right. What remained of Patrick Hockstetter's body was still there, amid a few lumpy, overgrown things that might have been books. The only really recognizable thing was a jutting semicircle of teeth, two or three of them with fillings.
And something nearby. A gleaming circle barely seen in the match's guttering light.
Bill shook the match out and lit another. He picked it up. 'Audra's wedding ring,' he said. His voice was hollow, expressionless.
The match went out in his ringers.
In the darkness he put the ring on.
'Bill?' Richie said hesitantly. 'Do you have any idea
6
In the Tunnels / 2:20 P.M.
how long they had been wandering through the tunnels under Derry since they had left the place where Patrick Hockstetter's body was, but Bill was sure he could never find his way back. He kept thinking about what his father had said: You could wander for weeks. If Eddie's sense of direction failed them now, they wouldn't need It to kill them; they would wander until they died . . . or, if they got into the wrong set of pipes, until they were drowned like rats in a rain-barrel.
But Eddie didn't seem a bit worried. Every now and then he would ask Bill to light one of their diminishing store of matches, look around thoughtfully, and then set off again. He made rights and lefts seemingly at random. Sometimes the pipes were so big Bill could not reach their tops even by stretching his hand up all the way. Sometimes they had to crawl, and once, for five horrible minutes (which felt more like five hours), they wormed their way along on their bellies, Eddie now leading, the others following with their noses to the heels of the person ahead.
The only thing Bill was completely sure of was that they had somehow gotten into a disused section of the Derry sewer system. They had left all the active pipes either far behind or far above. The roar of running water had dimmed to a far-off thunder. These pipes were older, not kiln-fired ceramic but a crumbly claylike stuff that sometimes oozed springs of unpleasant-smelling fluid. The smells of human waste - those ripe gassy smells that had threatened to suffocate them all - had faded, but they had been replaced by another smell, yellow and ancient, that was worse.
Ben thought it was the smell of the mummy. To Eddie it smelled like the leper. Richie thought it smelled like the world's oldest flannel jacket, now moldering and rotting - a lumberman's jacket, a very big one, big enough for a character like Paul Bunyan, perhaps. To Beverly it smelled like her father's sock-drawer. In Stan Uris it woke a dreadful memory from his earliest childhood - an oddly Jewish memory in a boy who had only the haziest understanding of his own Jewishness. It smelled like clay mixed with oil and made him think of an eyeless, mouthless demon called the Golem, a clay man that renegade Jews were supposed to have raised in the Middle Ages to save them from the goyim who robbed them and raped their women and then sent them packing. Mike thought of the dry smell of feathers in a dead nest.
When they finally reached the end of the narrow pipe, they slithered like eels down the curved surface of another which ran at an oblique angle to the one they had been in, and found they could stand up again. Bill felt the heads of the matches left in the book. Four. His mouth tightened and he resolved not to tell the others how close they were to the end of their light . . . not unless he absolutely had to.
'Huh-Huh-How you g-g-guys d-doin?'
They murmured replies, and he nodded in the dark. No panic, and no tears since Stan's. That was good. He felt for their hands and they stood together in the dark that way for awhile, both taking and giving from the touch. Bill felt clear exultation in this, a sure sense that they were somehow producing more than the sum of their seven selves; they had been re-added into a more potent whole.
He lit one of the remaining matches and they saw a narrow tunnel stretching ahead on a downward slant. The top of this pipe was festooned with sagging cobwebs, some water-broken and hanging in shrouds. Looking at them gave Bill an atavistic chill. The floor here was dry but thick with ancient mold and what might have been leaves, fungus . . . or some unimaginable droppings. Farther up he saw a pile of bones and a drift of green rags. They might once have been that stuff they called 'polished cotton,' workman's clothes. Bill imagined some Sewer Department or Water Department worker who had gotten lost, wandered down here, and been discovered . . .
The match guttered. He tipped its head downward, wanting the light to last a little longer.
'Do y-y-you nuh-know where w-w-we are?' he asked Eddie.
Eddie pointed down the slightly crooked bore of the tunnel. 'Canal's that way,' he said. 'Less'n half a mile, unless this thing turns in a different direction. We're under Up-Mile Hill right now, I think. But Bill - '
The match burned Bill's ringers and he let it drop. They were in darkness again. Someone - Bill thought it was Beverly - sighed. But before the match had gone out, he had seen the worry on Eddie's face.
'W-W-What? What ih-is it?'
'When I say we're under Up-Mile Hill, I mean we're really under it. We been going down for a long time now. Nobody'd ever put sewer-pipe in this deep. When you put a tunnel this deep you call it a mine-shaft.'
'How deep do you figure we are, Eddie?' Richie asked.
'Quarter of a mile,' Eddie said. 'Maybe more.'
'Jesus-please-us,' Beverly said.
'These aren't sewer-pipes, anyway,' Stan said from behind them. 'You can tell by that smell. It's bad, but it's not a sewery smell.'
'I think I'd rather smell the sewer,' Ben said. 'It smells like - '
A scream floated down to them, issuing from the mouth of the pipe they had just left, lifting the hair on the nape of Bill's neck. The seven of them drew together, clutching each other.
' - gonna get you sons of bitches. We're gonna get youuuuuuu -
'Henry,' Eddie breathed. 'Oh my God, he's still coming.'
'I'm not surprised,' Richie said. 'Some people are too stupid to quit.'
They could hear faint panting, the scrape of shoes, the whisper of cloth.