7
Under the City / 4:15 P.M.
Eddie led them through the darkened tunnels for an hour, perhaps an hour and a half, before admitting, in a tone that was more bewildered than frightened, that for the first time in his life he was lost.
They could still hear the dim thunder of water in the drains, but the acoustics of all of these tunnels was so crazed that it was impossible to tell if the water-sounds were coming from ahead or behind, left or right, above or below. Their matches were gone. They were lost in the dark.
Bill was scared . . . plenty scared. The conversation he'd had with his father in his father's shop kept coming back to him. There's nine pounds of blueprints that just disappeared somewhere along the line . . . My point is that nobody knows where all the damned sewers and drains go, or why. When they work, nobody cares. When they don't, there's three or four sad sacks from Derry Water who have to try and find out which pump went flooey or where the plug-up is . . . It's dark and smelly and there are rats. Those are all good reasons to stay out, but the best reason is that you could get lost. It's happened before.
Happened before. Happened before. It's happened -
Sure it had. There was that bundle of bones and polished cotton they had passed on the way to Its lair, for instance.
Bill felt panic trying to rise and pushed it back. It went, but not easily. He could feel it back there, a live thing, struggling and twisting, trying to get out. Adding to it was the nagging unanswerable question of whether they had killed It or not. Richie said yes, Mike said yes, so did Eddie. But he hadn't liked the frightened doubtful look on Bev's face, or on Stan's, as the light died and they crawled back through the small door, away from the susurating collapsing web.
'So what do we do now?' Stan asked. Bill heard the frightened, little-boy tremble in Stan's voice and knew the question was aimed directly at him.
'Yeah,' Ben said. 'What? Damn, I wish we had a flashlight . . . or even a can . . . candle.' Bill thought he heard a stifled sob in the second ellipsis. It frightened him more than anything else. Ben would have been astounded to know it, but Bill thought the fat boy tough and resourceful, steadier than Richie and less apt to cave in suddenly than Stan. If Ben was getting ready to crack, they were on the edge of very bad trouble. It was not the skeleton of the Water Department guy to which Bill's own mind kept returning but to Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher, lost in McDougal's Cave. He would push the thought away and then it would come stealing back.