'Are you, Bill?' Richie asked.
'Y-Y-Yeah.' He turned to Eddie and hugged the smaller boy with fierce intensity. 'You suh-suh-saved my luh-life, man.'
'It ate your shoe,' Beverly said, and uttered a wild laugh. 'Isn't that too bad.'
'I'll buy you a new pair of Keds when we get out of here,' Richie said. He clapped Eddie on the back in the dark. 'How did you do it, Eddie?'
'Shot it with my aspirator. Pretended it was acid. That's how it tastes after awhile if I'm having, you know, a bad day. Worked great.'
'"I'm doing the Mashed Potatoes all over It and I GOT A BROKEN ARM," Richie said, and giggled madly. 'Not too shabby, Eds. Actually pretty chuckalicious, tell you what.'
'I hate it when you call me Eds.'
'I know,' Richie said, hugging him tightly, 'but somebody has to toughen you up, Eds. When you stop leading the sheltered igszistence of a child and grow up, you gonna, Ah say, Ah say you gonna find out life ain't always this easy, boy!'
Eddie began to shriek with laughter. 'That's the shittiest Voice I ever heard, Richie.'
'Well, keep that aspirator thing handy,' Beverly said. 'We might need it again.'
'You didn't see It anywhere?' Mike asked. 'When you lit the match?'
'Ih-Ih-It's g-g-gone,' Bill said, and then added grimly: 'But we're getting close to It. To the pluh-hace where Ih-It stuh-stuh-stays. And I th-think we h-h-hurt Ih-hit th-that time.'
'Henry's still coming,' Stan said. His voice was low and hoarse. 'I can hear him back there.'
'Then let's move out,' Ben said.
They did. The tunnel progressed steadily downward, and that smell - that low wild stench - grew steadily stronger. At times they could hear Henry behind them, but now his cries seemed far away and not at all important. There was a feeling in all of them - similar to that feeling of skew and disconnection they had felt in the house on Neibolt Street - that they had progressed over the edge of the world and into some queer nothingness. Bill felt (although he did not have the vocabulary to express what he knew) that they were approaching Derry's dark and ruined heart.
It seemed to Mike Hanlon that he could almost feel that heart's diseased, arrhythmic beat. Beverly felt a sense of evil power growing around her, seeming to enfold her, certainly trying to split her off from the others and make her alone. Nervously, she reached out on either side of herself and clasped Bill's hand and Ben's. It seemed to her that she had to reach too far, and she called out nervously: 'Hang onto hands! It's like we're moving away from each other!'
It was Stan who first realized he could see again. There was a low, strange radiance in the air. At first he could only see hands - his, clasping Ben's on one side and Mike's on the other. Then he realized he could see the buttons on Richie's muddy shirt and the Captain Midnight ring - just some junky cereal-box prize - that Eddie liked to wear on his little finger.
'Can you guys see?' Stan asked, coming to a stop. The others stopped, too. Bill looked around, first aware that he could see - a little, anyway - and then that the tunnel had widened out amazingly. They were now in a curved chamber easily as big as the Sunnier Tunnel in Boston. Bigger, he amended as he looked around with a growing sense of awe.
They craned their necks back to see the ceiling, which was now fifty feet or more above them, and held up by outcurving buttresses of stone like ribs. Nets of dirty cobweb hung between them. The floor was now stone-flagged, but overlaid with such a drift of ancient dirt that the quality of their footfalls had never changed. The up-curving walls were easily fifty feet away on either side.
'Waterworks must have really gone crazy down here,' Richie said, and laughed uneasily.
'Looks like a cathedral,' Beverly said softly.
'Where's the light coming from?' Ben wanted to know.
'Coming r-right out of the w-w-walls, looks l-like,' Bill said.
'I don't like it,' Stan said.
'Let's guh-go. H-H-Henry'll be breathing d-d-down our nuh-necks - '
A loud, braying cry split the gloom, and then the ruffling, heavy thunder of wings. A shape came cruising out of the dark, one eye glaring - the other was a dark lamp.
'The bird!' Stan screamed. 'Look out, it's the bird!'
It dived at them like an obscene fighter-plane, Its plated orange beak opening and closing to reveal the pink inner lining of Its mouth, plush as a satin pillow in a coffin.
It went straight for Eddie.
Its beak raked his shoulder and he felt pain sink into his flesh like acid. Blood flowed down his chest. He cried out as the backwash of Its beating wings blew noxious tunnel air in his face. It wheeled back, Its eye glaring malevolently, rolling in Its socket, blurring only as Its nictitating eyelid jittered down momentarily to cover the eye with tissue-thin film. Its claws sought Eddie, who ducked, screaming. They razored through the back of his shirt, cutting it open, drawing shallow scarlet lines along his shoulderblades. Eddie yelled and tried to crawl away but the bird wheeled back again.
Mike broke forward, digging in his pocket. He came out with a one-blade Buck knife. As the bird dived on Eddie again, he swept it in a quick, tight arc across one of the bird's talons. It cut deep, and blood poured out. The bird banked away and then came back, folding Its wings, diving in like a bullet. Mike fell to one side at the last moment, slashing upward with the Buck knife. He missed, and the bird's claw hit his wrist with such force that his hand went numb and tingly - the bruise that later bloomed there went most of the way to his elbow. The Buck flew into the dark.
The bird came back, screeching triumphantly, and Mike rolled his body over Eddie's and waited for the worst.
Stan walked forward toward the two boys huddled on the floor as the bird returned. He stood, small and somehow trim in spite of the dirt grimed into his hands and arms and pants and shirt, and suddenly held his hands out in a curious gesture - palms up, fingers down. The bird uttered another squawk and sheared off, bulleting by Stan, missing him by inches, lifting his hair and then dropping it in the buffeting wake of Its passage. He turned in a tight circle to face Its return.
'I believe in scarlet tanagers even though I never saw one,' he said in a high clear voice. The bird screamed and banked away as if he'd shot at it. 'Same with vultures, and the New Guinea mudlark and the flamingos of Brazil.' The bird screamed, circled, and suddenly flew on up the tunnel, squawking. 'I believe in the golden bald eagle!' Stan screamed after it. 'And I think there really might be a phoenix somewhere! But I don't believe in you, so get the fuck out of here! Get out! Hit the road, Jack!'
He stopped then, and the silence seemed very large.
Bill, Ben, and Beverly went to Mike and Eddie; they helped Eddie to his feet and Bill looked at the cuts. 'Nuh-not d-d-deep,' he said. 'But I b-bet they h-hurt like h-h-hell.'
'It tore my shirt to pieces, Big Bill.' Eddie's cheeks glistened with tears, and he was wheezing again. The bellowing barbarian's voice was gone; it was hard to believe it had ever been there. 'What am I going to tell my mom?'
Bill smiled a little. 'Why d-d-don't we wuh-worry about that when we g-g-g-get out of here? Give yourself a bluh-hast, E-Eddie.'
Eddie did, inhaling deeply and then wheezing.
'That was great, man,' Richie told Stan. 'That was just frockin greatl'
Stan was shivering all over. 'There's no bird like that, that's all. There never has been and there never will be.'
'We're coming!' Henry screamed from behind them. His voice was utterly demented. He was laughing and howling now. He sounded like something that has crawled out of a crack in the roof of hell. 'Me'n Belch! We're coming and we'll get you little punks! You can't get away!'
Bill shouted: 'G-G-Get out, H-H Henry! W-W-While there's still tuh-tuh-time!'