'You deserve to die for killing me,' George whispered. He was very close now. Bill closed his eyes.
Then yellow light splashed the tunnel and he opened them. Richie was holding up a match. 'Fight It, Bill!' Richie shouted. 'God's sake! Fight It!'
What are you doing here? He looked at them, bewildered. They hadn't run after all. How could that be? How could that be after they had seen how foully he had murdered his own brother?
'Fight It!' Beverly was screaming. 'Oh Bill, fight It! Only you can do this one! Please - '
George was less than five feet away now. He suddenly stuck his tongue out at Bill. It was crawling with white fungoid growths. Bill screamed again.
'Kill It, Bill!' Eddie shouted. 'That's not your brother! Kill It while it's small! Kill It NOW!'
George glanced at Eddie, cutting his shiny-silver eyes that way for just a moment, and Eddie reeled back and struck the wall as if he had been pushed. Bill stood mesmerized, watching his brother come toward him, George again after all these years, it was George at the end as it had been George at the beginning, oh yes, and he could hear the creak of George's yellow slicker as George closed the distance, he could hear the jingle of the buckles on his overshoes and he could smell something like wet leaves, as if underneath the slicker George's body was made of them, as if the feet inside George's galoshes were leaf-feet, yes, a leaf-man, that was it, that was George, he was a rotted balloon face and a body made of dead leaves, the kind that sometimes choke the sewers after a flood.
Dimly he heard Beverly shriek.
(he thrusts his fists)
'Bill, please Bill - '
(against the posts and still insists)
'We'll look for my boat together,' George said. Thick yellow pus, mock tears, rolled down his cheeks. He reached for Bill and his head cocked sideward, his teeth peeling back from those fangs.
(he sees the ghosts he sees the ghosts HE SEES)
'We'll find it,' George said and Bill could smell Its breath and it was a smell like exploded animals lying on the highway at midnight. As George's mouth yawned, he could see things squirming around inside there. 'It's still down here, everything floats down here, we'll float, Bill, we'll all float - '
George's fishbelly hand closed on Bill's neck.
(HE SEES THE GHOSTS WE SEE THE GHOSTS THEY WE YOU SEE THE GHOSTS - )
George's contorted face drifted toward Bill's neck.
' - float - '
'He thrusts his fists against the posts!' Bill cried. His voice was deeper, hardly his own at all, and in a searing flash of memory Richie remembered that Bill only stuttered in his own voice: when he pretended to be someone else, he never did.
The George-thing recoiled, hissing, Its hand going to Its face in a warding-off gesture.
'That's it!' Richie screamed deliriously. 'You got It, Bill! Get It! Get It! Get It!'
'He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts!' Bill thundered. He advanced on the George-thing. 'You're no ghost! George knows I didn't mean for him to die! My folks were wrong! They took it out on me and that was wrong! Do you hear me?'
The George-thing abruptly turned, squealing like a rat. It began to run and ripple under the yellow slicker. The slicker itself seemed to be dripping, running in bright blots of yellow. It was losing Its shape, becoming amorphous.
'He thrusts his fists against the posts, you son of a bitch!' Bill Denbrough screamed, 'and still insists he sees the ghosts!' He leaped at It and his fingers snagged in the yellow rainslicker that was no longer a rainslicker. What he grabbed felt like some strange warm taffy that melted under his fingers as soon as he had closed his fist around it. He fell to his knees. Then Richie yelled as the guttering match burned his fingers and they were plunged into darkness again.
Bill felt something begin to grow in his chest, something hot and choking and as painful as fiery nettles. He gripped his knees and drew them up to his chin, hoping it would stop the pain, or perhaps ease it; he was dimly thankful for the dark, glad that the others couldn't see this agony.
He heard a sound escape him - a wavering moan. There was a second; a third. 'George!' he cried. George, I'm sorry! I never meant for anything b-b-b-bad to huh-huh-happen!'
Perhaps there was something else to say, but he could not say it. He was sobbing then, lying on his back with one arm over his eyes, remembering the boat, remembering the steady beat of the rain against his bedroom windows, remembering the medicines and the tissues on the nighttable, the faint ache of fever in his head and in his body, remembering George, most of all that: remembering George, George in his yellow hooded slicker.
'George, I'm sorry!' he cried through his tears. 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please, I'm suh-suh-SORRY - '
And then they were around him, his friends, and no one lit a match, and someone held him, he didn't know who, Beverly maybe, or maybe Ben, or Richie. They were with him, and for that little while the darkness was kind.
10
Derry / 5:30 A.M.
By 5:30 it was raining hard. The weather forecasters on the Bangor radio stations expressed mild surprise and tendered mild apologies to all the people who had made plans for picnics and outings on the basis of yesterday's forecasts. Tough break, folks; just one of those odd weather patterns that sometimes developed in the Penobscot Valley with startling suddenness.
On WZON, meteorologist Jim Witt described what he called an 'extraordinarily disciplined' low-pressure system. That was putting it mildly. Conditions went from cloudy in Bangor to showery in Hampden to drizzly in Haven to moderate rain in Newport. But in Derry, only thirty miles from downtown Bangor, it was pouring. Travellers on Route 7 found themselves moving through water that was eight inches deep in places, and beyond the Rhulin Farms a plugged culvert in a dip had covered the highway with so much water that the highway was actually impassable. By six that morning the Derry Highway Patrol had orange DETOUR signs on both sides of the dip.
Those who waited under the shelter on Main Street for the first bus of the day to take them to work stood looking over the railing at the Canal, where the water was ominously high in its concrete channel. There would be no flood, of course; all agreed on that. The water was still four feet below the high-water mark of 1977, and there had been no flood that year. But the rain came down with steady pounding persistence, and thunder grumbled in the low clouds. Water ran down Up-Mile Hill in streams and roared in the stormdrains and sewers.
No flood, they agreed, but there was a patina of unease on every face.
At 5:45 a power-transformer on a pole beside the abandoned Tracker Brothers' Truck Depot exploded in a flash of purple light, spraying twisted chunks of metal onto the shingled roof. One of the flying chunks of metal severed a high-tension wire, which also fell on the roof, spluttering and twisting like a snake, shooting an almost liquid stream of sparks. The roof caught fire in spite of the downpour, and soon the depot was blazing. The power-cable tumbled from the roof to the weedy verge that led around to the lot where small boys had once played baseball. The Derry Fire Department rolled for the first time that day at 6:02 A.M. and arrived at Tracker Brothers' at 6:09. One of the first firemen off the truck was Calvin Clark, one of the Clark twins with whom Ben, Beverly, Richie, and Bill had gone to school. His third step away from the truck brought the sole of his leather boot down on the live line. Calvin was electrocuted almost instantly. His tongue popped out of his mouth and his rubber fireman's coat began to smolder. He smelled like burning tires at the town dump.