'Gruh-gruh-grab my hub-hands!' Bill screamed. 'Kwuh-kwuh-quick!'
Richie dropped the match and seized one of Bill's hands. Beverly grabbed the other. She groped with her free hand, and Eddie grasped it feebly with the hand at the end of his broken arm. Ben grasped his other hand and completed the circle by holding Richie's hand.
'Send him our power!' Bill cried in that same strange, deep voice. 'Send him our power,whatever You are, send him our power! Now! Now! Now!'
Beverly felt something go out from them and toward Mike. Her head rolled on her shoulders in a kind of ecstasy, and the harsh whistle of Eddie's breathing merged with the headlong thunder of water in the drains.
12
'Now,' Mark Lamonica said in a low voice. He sighed — the sigh of a man who feels orgasm approaching.
Mike pushed the call-button in his hands again and again. He could hear it ringing at the nurses' station down the hall, but no one came. With a kind of hellish second sight he understood that the nurses were sitting around down there, reading the morning paper, drinking coffee, hearing his call-bell but not hearing it, hearing but not responding, they would respond only later when it was all over, because that was how things worked in Derry. In Derry some things were better not seen or heard . . . until they were over.
Mike let the call –button fall from his hands.
Mark bent toward him, the tip of the syringe glittering. His Saint Christopher medal swung hypnotically back and forth as he drew the sheet down.
'Right there,' he whispered. The sternum.' And sighed again.
Mike suddenly felt power wash into him — some primitive power that crammed his body like volts. He stiffened, fingers splaying out as if in a convulsion. His eyes widened. A grunt jerked out of him, and that sense of dreadful paralysis was driven from him as if by a roundhouse slap.
His right hand pistoned out toward the nighttable. There was a plastic pitcher there and a heavy cafeteria –style water-glass beside it. His hand closed around the glass. Lamonica sensed the change; that dreamy, pleased ilght disappeared from his eyes and was replaced by wary confusion. He drew back a bit, and then Mike brought the glass up and smashed it into his face.
Lamonica screamed and staggered backward, dropping the syringe. His hands went to his spouting face; blood ran down his wrists and splashed on his white tunic.
The power left as suddenly as it had come. Mike looked dully at the shards of broken glass on the bed and his hospital johnny and his own bleeding hand. He heard the quick, light sound of crepe-soled shoes in the hall, approaching.
Now they come, he thought, Oh yes, now. And after they're gone, who'll show up? Who'll show up next?
As they burst into his room, the nurses who had sat calmly on station as his call-bell rang frantically, Mike closed his eyes and prayed for it to be over. He prayed his friends were somewhere under the city, he prayed they were all right, he prayed they would end it.
He didn't know exactly Who he prayed to . . . but he prayed nonetheless.
13
Under the City / 6:54 A.M.
'He's a-a-all ruh –right,' Bill said presently.
Ben didn't know how long they had stood in the darkness, holding hands. It seemed to him that he had felt something — something from them, from their circle — go out and then come back. But he did not know where that thing — if it existed at all — had gone, or done.
'Are you sure, Big Bill?' Richie asked.
'Y-Y-Yes.' Bill released Richie's hand and Beverly's. 'But we h-have to finish this as kwuh-quick as we c-can. C-Come oh-oh-on.'
They went on, Richie or Bill periodically lighting matches. We don't have so much as apea-shooter among us, Ben thought. But that's part of it, too, isn't it? Chüd. What does that mean? What was It, exactly? What was Its final face? And even if we didn't kill It, we hurt It. How did we do that?
The chamber they walked through — it could no longer be called a tunnel — grew larger and larger. Their footfalls echoed. Ben remembered the smell, that thick zoo smell. He became aware that the matches were no longer necessary — there was light now, light of a sort: a ghastly effulgence that was growing steadily stronger. In that marshy light, his friends all looked like walking corpses.
'Wall up ahead, Bill,' Eddie said.
'I nuh-nuh –know.'
Ben felt his heart begin to pick up speed. There was a sour taste in his mouth and his head had begun to ache. He felt slow and frightened. He felt fat.
'The door,' Beverly whispered.
Yes, here it was. Once, twenty-seven years before, they had been able to pass through that door by doing no more than ducking their heads. Now they would have to duck-walk their way through, or crawl on hands and knees. They had grown; here was final proof, if final proof were needed.
The pulse-points in Ben's neck and wrists felt hot and bloody; his heart had picked up a light and rapid flutter that was close to arrhythmia. Pigeon-pulse, he thought randomly, and licked his lips.
Bright greenish-yellow light flooded out from under the door; it shot through the ornate keyhole in a twisting shaft that looked almost thick enough to cut.
The mark was on the door, and again they all saw something different in that strange device. Beverly saw Tom's face. Bill saw Audra's severed head with blank eyes that stared at him in dreadful accusation. Eddie saw a grinning skull poised over two crossed bones, the symbol for poison. Richie saw the bearded face of a degenerate Paul Bunyan, eyes narrowed to killer's slits. And Ben saw Henry Bowers.
'Bill, are we strong enough?' he asked. 'Can we do this?'
'I duh-hon't nuh –nuh –know,' Bill said.
'What if it's locked?' Beverly asked in a small voice. Tom's face mocked her.
'Ih-It's not,' Bill said. 'Pluh –haces like this are n-never luh-luh –locked.' He placed the tented fingers of his right hand on the door — he had to bend over to do it — and pushed. It swung open on a flood of sick yellow-green light. That zoo smell wafted out at them, the smell of the past become the present, horribly alive, obscenely vital.
Roll, wheel, Bill thought randomly, and looked around at them. Then he dropped to his hands and knees. Beverly followed, then Richie, then Eddie. Ben came last, his flesh crawling at the feel of the ancient grit on the floor. He passed through the portal, and as he straightened up in the weird glow of fire crawling up and down the dripping stone walls in snakes of light, the last memory socked home with the force of a psychic battering ram.
He cried out, staggering back, one hand going to his head, and his first incoherent thought was No wonder Stan committed suicide! Oh God, I wish I had! He saw the same expressions of stunned horror and dawning realization on the faces of the others as the last key turned in the last lock.
Then Beverly was shrieking, clingin g to Bill, as It raced down the gossamer curtain of Its webbing, a nightmare Spider from beyond time and space, a Spider from beyond the fevered imaginings of whatever inmates may live in the deepest depths of hell.
No, Bill thought coldly, not a Spider either, not really, but this shape isn't one It picked out of our minds; it's just the closest our minds can come to
(the deadlights)
whatever It really is.
It was perhaps fifteen feet high and as black as a moonless night. Each of Its legs wa s as thick as a muscle –builder's thigh. Its eyes were bright malevolent rubies, bulging from sockets filled with some dripping chromium-colored fluid. Its jagged mandibles opened and closed,