It

  Bill hung back a moment longer, and then snapshots of the children, all the dead children, seemed to flutter through his mind like lost photographs from George's album. SCHOOL

  FRIENDS.

  "A-All ruh-right. Let's g-go. Guh-Guh-God forgive m-me."

  He and Richie ran under the strand of cross-webbing seconds before it collapsed, and joined Ben on the other side. They ran after It as Audra swung and dangled fifty feet above the stone floor, wrapped in a numbing cocoon that was attached to the decaying web.

  9

  Ben

  They followed the trail of Its black blood--oily pools of ichor that ran and dripped into the cracks between the flagstones. But as the floor began to rise toward a semicircular black opening at the far side of the chamber, Ben saw something new: a trail of eggs. Each was black and rough-shelled, perhaps as big as an ostrich-egg. A waxy light shone from within them. Ben realized they were semitransparent; he could see black shapes moving inside.

  Itschildren, he thought, and felt his gorge rise. Its miscarried children. God! God!

  Richie and Bill had stopped and were staring at the eggs with stupid, dazed wonder.

  "Go on! Go on!" Ben shouted. "I'll take care of them! Get It!"

  "Here!" Richie shouted, and threw Ben a pack of Derry Town House matches.

  Ben caught them. Bill and Richie ran on. Ben watched them in the rapidly dimming light for a moment. They ran into the darkness of Its escape-passage and were lost from sight. Then he looked down at the first of the thin-shelled eggs, at the black, mantalike shadow inside, and felt his determination waver. This ... hey guys, this was too much. This was simply too awful. And surely they would die without his help; they had not been so much laid as dropped.

  But Its time was close ... and if one of them is capable of surviving ... even one ...

  Summoning all of his courage, summoning up Eddie's pale, dying face, Ben brought one Desert Driver boot down on the first egg. It broke with a sodden squelch as some stinking placenta ran out around his boot. Then a spider the size of a rat was scrabbling weakly across the floor, trying to get away, and Ben could hear it in his head, its high mewling cries like the sound of a handsaw being bent rapidly back and forth so that it makes ghost-music.

  Ben lurched after it on legs that felt like stilts and brought his foot down again. He felt the spider's body crunch and splatter under the heel of his boot. His gorge clenched and this time there was no way he could hold back. He vomited, then twisted his heel, grinding the thing into the stones, listening to the cries in his head fade to nothing.

  How many? How many eggs? Didn't I read somewhere that spiders can lay thousands ... or millions? I can't keep doing this, I'll go mad--

  You have to. You have to. Come on, Ben ... get it together!

  He went to the next egg and repeated the process in the last of the dying light. Everything was repeated: the brittle snap, the squelch of liquid, the final coup de grace. The next. The next. The next. Making his way slowly toward the black arch into which his friends had gone. The darkness was complete now, Beverly and the decaying web somewhere behind him. He could still hear the whisper of its collapse. The eggs were pallid stones in the dark. As he reached each one he struck a light from the matchbook and broke it open. In each case he was able to follow the course of the dazed spiderling and crush it before the light flickered out. He had no idea how he was going to proceed if his matches gave out before he had crushed the last of the eggs and killed each one's unspeakable cargo.

  10

  It/1985

  Still coming.

  It sensed them still coming, gaining, and Its fear grew. Perhaps It was not eternal after all--the unthinkable must finally be thought. Worse, It sensed the death of Its young. A third of these hated hateful men-boys was walking steadily up Its trail of birth, almost insane with revulsion but continuing nonetheless, methodically stamping the life from each of Its eggs.

  No! It wailed, lurching from side to side, feeling Its life-force running from a hundred wounds, none of them mortal in itself, but each a song of pain, each slowing It. One of Its legs hung by a single living twist of meat. One of Its eyes was blind. It sensed a terrible rupture inside, the result of whatever poison one of the hated men-boys had managed to shoot down Its throat.

  And still they came on, closing the distance, and how could this happen? It whined and mewled, and when It sensed them almost directly behind, It did the only thing It could do now: It turned to fight.

  11

  Beverly

  Before the last of the light faded and utter dark closed down, she saw Bill's wife plunge another twenty feet and then fetch up again. She had begun to spin, her long red hair fanning out. His wife, she thought. But I was his first love, and if he thought some other woman was his first, it was only because he forgot ... forgot Derry.

  Then she was in darkness, alone with the sound of the falling web and Eddie's simple moveless weight. She didn't want to let him go, didn't want to let his face lie on the foul floor of this place. So she held his head in the crook of an arm that had gone mostly numb and brushed his hair away from his damp forehead. She thought of the birds ... that was something she supposed she had gotten from Stan. Poor Stan, who hadn't been able to face this.

  All of them ... I was their first love.

  She tried to remember it--it was something good to think about in all this darkness, where you couldn't place the sounds. It made her feel less alone. At first it wouldn't come; the image of the birds intervened--crows and grackles and starlings, spring birds that came back from somewhere while the streets were still running with meltwater and the last patches of crusted dirty snow clung grimly to their shady places.

  It seemed to her that it was always on a cloudy day that you first heard and saw those spring birds and wondered where they came from. Suddenly they were just back in Derry, filling the white air with their raucous chatter. They lined the telephone wires and roofpeaks of the Victorian houses on West Broadway; they jostled for places on the aluminum branches of the elaborate TV antenna on top of Wally's Spa; they loaded the wet black branches of the elms on Lower Main Street. They settled, they talked to each other in the screamy babbling voices of old countrywomen at the weekly Grange Bingo games, and then, at some signal which humans could not discern, they all took wing at once, turning the sky black with their numbers ... and came down somewhere else.

  Yes, the birds, I was thinking of them because I was ashamed. It was my father who made me ashamed, I guess, and maybe that was Its doing, too. Maybe.

  The memory came--the memory behind the birds--but it was vague and disconnected. Perhaps this one always would be. She had--

  Her thoughts broke off as she realized that Eddie

  12

  Love and Desire/August 10th, 1958

  comes to her first, because he is the most frightened. He comes to her not as her friend of that summer, or as her brief lover now, but the way he would have come to his mother only three or four years ago, to be comforted; he doesn't draw back from her smooth nakedness and at first she doubts if he even feels it. He is trembling, and although she holds him the darkness is so perfect that even this close she cannot see him; except for the rough cast he might as well be a phantom.

  "What do you want?" he asks her.

  "You have to put your thing in me, " she says.

  He tries to pull back but she holds him and he subsides against her. She has heard someone--Ben, she thinks--draw in his breath.

  "Bevvie, I can't do that. I don't know how--"

  "I think it's easy. But you'll have to get undressed." She thinks about the intricacies of managing cast and shirt, first somehow separating and then rejoining them, and amends, "Your pants, anyway."

  "No, I can't!" But she thinks part of him can, and wants to, because his trembling has stopped and she feels something small and hard which presses against the right side of her belly.

  "You can," she says, and pulls him down. The surface beneath he
r bare back and legs is firm, clayey, dry. The distant thunder of the water is drowsy, soothing. She reaches for him. There's a moment when her father's face intervenes, harsh and forbidding

  (I want to see if you're intact)

  and then she closes her arms around Eddie's neck, her smooth cheek against his smooth cheek, and as he tentatively touches her small breasts she sighs and thinks for the first time This is Eddie and she remembers a day in July--couldit only have been last month?--when no one else turned up in the Barrens but Eddie, and he had a whole bunch of Little Lulu comic books and they read together for most of the afternoon, Little Lulu looking for beebleberries and getting in all sorts of crazy situations, Witch Hazel, all of those guys. It had been fun.

  She thinks of birds; in particular of the grackles and starlings and crows that come back in the spring, and her hands go to his belt and loosen it, and he says again that he can't do that; she tells him that he can, she knows he can, and what she feels is not shame or fear now but a kind of triumph.

  "Where?" he says, and that hard thing pushes urgently against her inner thigh.

  "Here," she says.

  "Bevvie, I'll fall on you!" he says, and she hears his breath start to whistle painfully.

  "I think that's sort of the idea, " she tells him and holds him gently and guides him. He pushes forward too fast and there is pain.

  Ssssss!--she draws her breath in, her teeth biting at her lower lip and thinks of the birds again, the spring birds, lining the roofpeaks of houses, taking wing all at once under low March clouds.

  "Beverly?" he says uncertainly. "Are you okay?"

  "Go slower," she says. "It'll be easier for you to breathe." He does move more slowly, and after awhile his breathing speeds up but she understands this is not because there is anything wrong with him.

  The pain fades. Suddenly he moves more quickly, then stops, stiffens, and makes a sound--some sound. She senses that this is something for him, something extraordinarily special, something like ... like flying. She feels powerful: she feels a sense of triumph rise up strongly within her. Is this what her father was afraid of? Well he might be! There was power in this act, all right, a chain-breaking power that was blood-deep. She feels no physical pleasure, but there is a kind of mental ecstasy in it for her. She senses the closeness. He puts his face against her neck and she holds him He's crying. She holds him. And feels the part of him that made a connection between them begin to fade. It is not leaving her, exactly; it is simply fading, becoming less.

  When his weight shifts away she sits up and touches his face in the darkness.

  "Did you?"

  "Did I what?"

  "Whatever it is. I don't know, exactly."

  He shakes his head--shefeels it with her hand against his cheek.

  "I don't think it was exactly like ... you know, like the big boys say. But it was ... it was really something. He speaks low so the others can't hear. "I love you, Bevvie."

  Her consciousness breaks down a little there. She's quite sure there's more talk, some whispered, some loud, and can't remember what is said. It doesn't matter. Does she have to talk each of them into it all over again? Yes, probably. But it doesn't matter. They have to be talked into it, this essential human link between the world and the infinite, the only place where the bloodstream touches eternity. It doesn't matter. What matters is love and desire. Here in this dark is as good a place as any. Better than some, maybe.

  Mike comes to her, then Richie, and the act is repeated. Now she feels some pleasure, dim heat in her childish unmatured sex, and she closes her eyes as Stan comes to her and she thinks of the birds, spring and the birds, and she sees them, again and again, all lighting at once, filling up the winter-naked trees, shockwave riders on the moving edge of nature's most violent season, she sees them take wing again and again, the flutter of their wings like the snap of many sheets on the line, and she thinks: A month from now every kid in Derry Park will have a kite, they'll run to keep the strings from getting tangled with each other. She thinks again: This is what flying is like.

  With Stan as with the others, there is that rueful sense of fading, of leaving, with whatever they truly need from this act--some ultimate--close but as yet unfound.

  "Did you?" she asks again, and although she doesn't know exactly what "it" is, she knows that he hasn't.

  There is a long wait, and then Ben comes to her.

  He is trembling all over, but it is not the fearful trembling she felt in Stan.

  "Beverly, I can't," he says in a tone which purports to be reasonable and is anything but.

  "You can too. I can feel it."

  She sure can. There's more of this hardness; more of him. She can feel it below the gentle push of his belly. Its size raises a certain curiosity and she touches the bulge lightly. He groans against her neck, and the blow of his breath causes her bare body to dimple with goosebumps. She feels the first twist of real heat race through her--suddenlythe feeling in her is very large; she recognizes that it is too big

  (and is he too big, can she take that into herself?)

  and too old for her, something, some feeling that walks in boots. This is like Henry's M-80s, something not meant for kids, something that could explode and blow you up. But this was not the place or time for worry; here there was love, desire, and the dark. If they didn't try for the first two they would surely be left with the last.

  "Beverly, don't--"

  "Yes."

  "I ... "

  "Show me how to fly," she says with a calmness she doesn't feel, aware by the fresh wet warmth on her cheek and neck that he has begun to cry. "Show me, Ben."

  "No ..."

  "If you wrote the poem, show me. Feel my hair if you want to, Ben. It's all right. "

  "Beverly ... I ... I ..."

  He's not just trembling now; he's shaking all over. But she senses again that this ague is not all fear--partof it is the precursor of the throe this act is all about. She thinks of

  (the birds)

  his face, his dear sweet earnest face, and knows it is not fear; it is wanting he feels, a deep passionate wanting now barely held in check, and she feels that sense of power again, something like flying, something like looking down from above and seeing all the birds on the roofpeaks, on the TV antenna atop Wally's, seeing streets spread out maplike, oh desire, right, this was something, it was love and desire that taught you to fly.

  "Ben! Yes!" she cries suddenly, and the leash breaks.

  She feels pain again, and for a moment there is the frightening sensation of being crushed. Then he props himself up on the palms of his hands and that feeling is gone.

  He's big, oh yes--the pain is back, and it's much deeper than when Eddie first entered her. She has to bite her lip again and think of the birds until the burning is gone. But it does go, and she is able to reach up and touch his lips with one finger, and he moans.

  The heat is back, and she feels her power suddenly shift to him; she gives it gladly and goes with it. There is a sensation first of being rocked, of a delicious spiralling sweetness which makes her begin to turn her head helplessly from side to side, and a tuneless humming comes from between her closed lips, this is flying, this, oh love, oh desire, oh this is something impossible to deny, binding, giving, making a strong circle: binding, giving ... flying.

  "Oh Ben, oh my dear, yes," she whispers, feeling the sweat stand out on her face, feeling their connection, something firmly in place, something like eternity, the number 8 rocked over on its side. "I love you so much, dear. "

  And she feels the thing begin to happen--something of which the girls who whisper and giggle about sex in the girls' room have no idea, at least as far as she knows; they only marvel at how gooshy sex must be, and now she realizes that for many of them sex must be some unrealized undefined monster; they refer to the act as It. Would you do It, do your sister and her boyfriend do It, do your mom and dad still do It, and how they never intend to do It; oh yes, you would think that the whole girls'
side of the fifth-grade class was made up of spinsters-to-be, and it is obvious to Beverly that none of them can suspect this ... this conclusion, and she is only kept from screaming by her knowledge that the others will hear and think her badly hurt. She puts the side of her hand in her mouth and bites down hard. She understands the screamy laughter of Greta Bowie and Sally Mueller and all the others better now: hadn't they, the seven of them, spent most of this, the longest, scariest summer of their lives, laughing like loons? You laugh because what's fearful and unknown is also what's funny, you laugh the way a small child will sometimes laugh and cry at the same time when a capering circus clown approaches, knowing it is supposed to be funny ... but it is also unknown, full of the unknown's eternal power.

  Biting her hand will not stay the cry, and she can only reassure them--and Ben--by crying out her affirmative in the darkness.

  "Yes! Yes! Yes!" Glorious images of flight fill her head, mixing with the harsh calling of the grackles and starlings; these sounds become the world's sweetest music.

  So she flies, she flies up, and now the power is not with her or with him but somewhere between them, and he cries out, and she can feel his arms trembling, and she arches up and into him, feeling his spasm, his touch, his total fleeting intimacy with her in the dark. They break through into the lifelight together.

  Then it is over and they are in each other's arms and when he tries to say something--perhaps some stupid apology that would hurt what she remembers, some stupid apology like a handcuff, she stops his words with a kiss and sends him away.

  Bill comes to her.

  He tries to say something, but his stutter is almost total now.

  "You be quiet," she says, secure in her new knowledge, but aware that she is tired now. Tired and damned sore. The insides and backs of her thighs feel sticky, and she thinks it's maybe because Ben actually finished, or maybe because she is bleeding. "Everything is going to be totally okay."

  "A-A-Are you shuh-shuh-shuh-hure?"

  "Yes," she says, and links her hands behind his neck, feeling the sweaty mat of his hair. "You just bet."