9
George / 5:01 A.M.
Bill held the match up . . . and uttered a long trembling despairing screech.
It was George wavering up the tunnel toward him, George, still dressed in his blood-spattered yellow rainslicker. One sleeve dangled limp and useless. George's face was white as cheese and his eyes were shiny silver. They fixed on Bill's own.
'My boat!' Georgie's lost voice rose, wavering, in the tunnel. 'I can't find it, Bill, I've lookedeverywhere and I can't find it and now I'm dead and it's your fault your fault YOUR FAULT — '
'Juh-Juh-Georgie!' Bill shrieked. He felt his mind tottering, ripping free of its moorings.
George stumble-staggered toward him and now his one remaining arm rose toward Bill, the white hand at the end of it hooked into a claw. The nails were dirty and grasping.
'Your fault,' George whispered, and grinned. His teeth were fangs; they opened and closed slowly, like the teeth in a beartrap. 'You sent me out and it's all . . . your . . . fault.'
'Nuh-Nuh-No, Juh Juh-Georgie!' Bill cried. 'I dih-dih –didn't nuh-hun –nuh –know — '
'Kill you!' George cried, and a mixture of doglike sounds came out of that fanged mouth: yips, yelps, howls. A kind of laughter. Bill could smell him now, could smell George rotting. It was a cellar-smell, squirmy, the smell of some final monster standing slumped and yellow-eyed in the corner, waiting to unzip some small boy's guts.
George's teeth gnashed together. The sound was like billiard balls clicking off one another. Yellow pus began to leak from his eyes and dribble down his face . . . and the match went out.
Bill felt his friends disappear — they were running, of course they were, they were leaving him alone. They were cutting him off, as his parents had cut him off because George was right: it was all his fault. Soon he would feel that single hand seize his throat, soon he would feel those fangs pulling him open, and that would be right. That would be only just. He had
sent George out to die and he had spent his whole adult life writing about the horror of that betrayal — oh, he had put many faces on it, almost as many faces as It had put on for their benefit, but the monster at the bottom of everything was only George, running out into the receding flood with his paraffin-coated paper boat. Now would come the atonement.
'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.