It

He stopped then, and the silence seemed very large.

Bill, Ben, and Beverly went to Mike and Eddie; they helpe d 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!'

Henry's response was a hollow, inarticulate scream. They heard a hustle of footsteps and in a burst of comprehension Bill understood Henry's whole purpose: he was real, he was mortal, he could not be stopped by an aspirator or a bird-book. Magic would not work on Henry. He was too stupid.

'C-C-Come oh-on. We guh-gotta stay a-a-ahead of h-h-him.'

They went on again, holding hands, Eddie's tattered shirt flapping behind him. The light grew brighter, the tunnel ever huger. As it canted downward, the ceiling flew away above until they could barely see it. It now seemed to them that they were not walking in a tunnel at all but making their way through a titanic underground courtyard, the approach to some cyclopean castle. The light from the walls had become a running green-yellow fire. The smell was stronger, and they began to pick up a vibration that might have been real or might have been only in their minds. It was steady and rhythmic.

It was a heartbeat.

'It ends up ahead!' Beverly cried. 'Look! It's a blank wall!'

But as they drew closer, antlike now on this great floor of dirty stone blocks, each block bigger than Bassey Park, it seemed, they saw that the wall was not entirely blank after all. It was broken by a single door. And although the wall itself towered hundreds of feet above them, the door was very small. It was no more than three feet high, a door of the sort you might see in a fairytale book, made of stout oaken boards bound with iron strips in an X-pattern. It was, they all realized at once, a door made only for children.

Ghostly, in his mind, Ben heard the librarian reading to the little ones: Who is that trip-trapping upon my bridge? The children lean forward, all the old fascination glistening in their eyes: will the monster be bested . . . or will It feed?

There was a mark on the door, and heaped at its foot was a pile of bones. Small bones. The bones of God alone knew how many children.

They had come to the place of It.

The mark on the door, then: what was that?

Bill marked it as a paper boat.

Stan saw it as a bird rising toward the sky — a phoenix, perhaps.

Michael saw a hooded face — that of crazy Butch Bowers, perhaps, if it could only be seen.

Richie saw two eyes behind a pair of spectacles.

Beverly saw a hand doubled up into a fist.

Eddie believed it to be the face of the leper, all sunken eyes and wrinkled snarling mouth — all disease, all sickness, was stamped into that face.

Ben Hanscom saw a tattered pile of wrappings and seemed to smell old sour spices.

Later, arriving at that same door with Belch's screams still echoing in his ears, alone at the end of it, Henry Bowers would see it as the moon, full, ripe . . . and black.

'I'm scared, Bill,' Ben said in a wavering voice. 'Do we have to?' Bill toed the bones, and suddenly scattered them in a powdery, raiding drift with one foot. He was scared, too . . . but there was George to consider. It had ripped off George's arm. Were those small and fragile bones among these? Yes, of course they were.

They were here for the owners of the bones, George and all the others — those who had been brought here, those who might be brought here, those who ha d been left in other places simply to rot.

'We have to,' Bill said.

'What if it's locked?' Beverly asked in a small voice.

'Ih-It's not l-locked,' Bill said, and then told her what he knew from deeper inside: 'Pluh –haces like this are n-never luh-luh –locked.'

He placed the tented fingers of his right hand on the door and pushed. It swung open on a flood of sick yellow-green light. That zoo smell wafted out at them, incredibly strong, incredibly potent now.

One by one they passed through the fairytale door, and into the lair of It. Bill

7

In the Tunnels / 4:59 A.M.

stopped so suddenly that the others piled up like freight– cars when the engine suddenly comes to a panic-stop. 'What is it?' Ben called.

'Ih-Ih– It was h– h– here. The E h – E h –Eye. D-Do you r– r– remember?'

'I remember,' Richie said. 'Eddie stopped it with his aspirator. By pretending it was acid. He said something about some dance. Pretty chuckalicious, but I can't remember exactly what it was.'

'It d-d-doesn't m-m-matter. We won't suh-see anything we saw b-b-before,' Bill said. He struck a light and looked around at the others. Their faces were luminous in the glow of the match, luminous and mystic. And they seemed very young. 'H-H-How you guys d-doin?'

'We're okay, Big Bill,' Eddie said, but his face was drawn with pain. Bill's makeshift splint was coming apart. 'How bout you?'

'Oh-Oh-kay,' Bill said, and shook out the match before his face could tell them any different story.

'How did it happen?' Beverly asked him, touching his arm in the dark. 'Bill, how could she — ?'

'B-B-Because I muh-hentioned the n-name of the town. Sh-She c-c-came ah-hafter m– m-me. Even wh-when I was d-d-doing it, suh-suh-homething ih-hinside was t-t-telling me to sh-sh-shut uh-up. B-But I d-d-didn't luh-luh –histen.' He shook his head helplessly in the dark.

'But even if sh-she came to Duh-Duh-Derry, I d-d-don't uh-hunderstand h-h-how she c-could have guh-hotten d-d-down h-here. If H-H-Henry dih-didn't b-b-bring her, then who d-did?'

'It,' Ben said. 'It doesn't have to look bad, we know that. It could have shown up and said you were in trouble. Taken her here in order to . . . to fuck you up, I suppose. To kill our guts. Cause that's what you always were, Big Bill. Our guts.'

'Tom?' Beverly said in a low, almost musing voice.

'W-W-Who? Bill struck another match.

She was looking at him with a kind of desperate honesty. 'Tom. My husband. He knew, too. At least, I think I mentioned the name of the town to him, the wa y you mentioned it to Audra. I . . . I don't know if it took or not. He was pretty angry with me at the time.'

'Jesus, what is this, some kind of soap opera where everybody turns up sooner or later?' Richie said.

'Not a soap opera,' Bill said, sounding sick, 'a show. Like the circus. Bev here went and married Henry Bowers. When she left, why wouldn't he come here? After all, the real Henry did.'