It

  "Yes," Bill said. "It's 1-1-like the FBI training r-range at Quh-Quh-Quantico, in a w-w-way. They seh-send y-you down this f-f-hake street and p-pop up tuh-hargets. If you shuhshoot any honest citizens ih-instead of just cruh-crooks, you t-lose puh-hoints."

  "I can't do this, Bill," she said. "I'll mess it up. Here. You." She held the Bullseye out, but Bill shook his head.

  "You h-h-have to, B-Beverly."

  There was a mewling from another cupboard.

  Richie walked toward it.

  "Don't get too close!" Stan barked. "It might--"

  Richie looked inside and an expression of sick disgust crossed his face. He slammed the cupboard shut with a bang that produced a dead echo in the empty house.

  "A litter." Richie sounded ill. "Biggest litter I ever saw ... anyone ever saw, probably." He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. "There's hundreds of them in there." He looked at them, his mouth twitching a little on one side. "Their tails ... they were all tangled up, Bill. Knotted together." He grimaced. "Like snakes."

  They looked at the cupboard door. The mewling was muffled but still audible. Rats, Ben thought, looking at Bill's white face and, over Bill's shoulder, at Mike's ashy-gray one. Everyone's ascared of rats. It knows it, too.

  "C-C-Come on," Bill said. "H-Here on Nuh-Nuh-Neibolt Street, the f-f-fun just neh-hever stops."

  They went down the front hall. Here the unlovely smells of rotting plaster and old urine were intermixed. They were able to look out at the street through dirty panes of glass and see their bikes. Bev's and Ben's were heeled over on their kickstands. Bill's leaned against a stunted maple tree. To Ben the bikes looked a thousand miles away, like things seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The deserted street with its casual patchings of asphalt, the faded humid sky, the steady ding-ding-ding of a locomotive running on a siding ... these things seemed like dreams to him, hallucinations. What was real was this squalid hallway with its stinks and shadows.

  There was a shatter of broken brown glass in one corner--Rheingold bottles.

  In the other corner, wet and swollen, was a digest-sized girlybook. The woman on the cover was bent over a chair, her skirt up in the back to show the tops of her fishnet hose and her black panties. The picture did not look particularly sexy to Ben, nor did it embarrass him that Beverly had also glanced at it. Moisture had yellowed the woman's skin and humped the cover in ripples that became wrinkles on her face. Her salacious gaze had become the leer of a dead whore.

  (Years later, as Ben recounted this, Bev suddenly cried out, startling all of them--they were not so much listening to the story as reliving it. "It was her!" Bev yelled. "Mrs. Kersh! It was her!")

  As Ben looked, the young/old crone on the girlybook cover winked at him. She wiggled her fanny in an obscene come-on.

  Cold all over, yet sweating, Ben looked away.

  Bill pushed open a door on the left and they followed him into a vaultlike room that might once have been a parlor. A crumpled pair of green pants was hung over the light-fixture which depended from the ceiling. Like the cellar, this room seemed much too big to Ben, almost as long as a freight-car. Much too long for a house as small as this one had appeared from the outside--

  Oh, but that was outside, a new voice spoke inside his mind. It was a jocular, squealing voice, and Ben realized with sudden certainty that he was hearing Pennywise Itself; Pennywise was speaking to him on some crazy mental radio. Outside, things always look smaller than they really are, don't they, Ben?

  "Go away," he whispered.

  Richie turned to look at him, his face still strained and pale. "You say something?'

  Ben shook his head. The voice was gone. That was an important thing, a good thing. Yet

  (outside)

  he had understood. This house was a special place, a kind of station, one of the places in Derry, one of the many, perhaps, from which It was able to find Its way into the overworld. This stinking rotted house where everything was somehow wrong. It wasn't just that it seemed too big; the angles were wrong, the perspective crazy. Ben was standing just inside the door between the parlor and the hallway and the others were moving away from him across a space that now looked almost as big as Bassey Park ... but as they moved away, they seemed to grow larger instead of smaller. The floor seemed to slope, and--

  Mike turned. "Ben!" he called, and Ben saw alarm on his face. "Catch up! We're losing you!" He could barely hear the last word. It trailed away as if the others were being swept off on a fast train.

  Suddenly terrified, he began to run. The door behind him swept shut with a muffled bang. He screamed ... and something seemed to sweep through the air just behind him, ruffling his shirt. He looked back, but there was nothing there. That did not change his belief, however, that something had been.

  He caught up with the others. He was panting, out of breath, and would have sworn he had run half a mile at least ... but when he looked back, the parlor's far wall was not ten feet away.

  Mike grasped his shoulder hard enough to hurt.

  "You scared me, man," he said. Richie, Stan, and Eddie were looking at Mike questioningly. "He looked small," Mike said. "Like he was a mile away."

  "Bill!"

  Bill looked back.

  "We gotta make sure everybody stays close," Ben panted.

  "This place ... it's like the funhouse in a carnival, or something. We'll get lost. I think It wants us to get lost. To get separated."

  Bill looked at him for a moment, lips thin. "All right," he said. "We a-all stay cluh-cluh-hose. No s-s-stragglers."

  They nodded back, frightened, clustered outside the hall door. Stan's hand groped at the bird-book in his back pocket. Eddie was holding his aspirator in one hand, crunchng it, loosening up, then crunching it again, like a ninety-eight-pound weakling trying to build up his muscles with a tennis ball.

  Bill opened the door and here was another, narrower hall. The wallpaper, which showed runners of roses and elves wearing green caps, was falling away from the spongy plaster in draggling leaves. Yellow waterstains spread in senile rings on the ceiling overhead. A scummy wash of light fell through a dirty window at the end of the hall.

  Abruptly the corridor seemed to elongate. The ceiling rose and then began to diminish above them like some weird rocket. The doors grew with the ceiling, pulled up like taffy. The faces of the elves grew long and became alien, their eyes bleeding black holes.

  Stan shrieked and clapped his hands to his eyes.

  "Ih-Ih-hit's not ruh-ruh-ruh-REAL!" Bill screamed.

  "It is!" Stan screamed back, his small closed fists plugging his eyes. "It's real, you know it is, God, I'm going crazy, this is crazy, this is crazy--"

  "Wuh-wuh-WATCH!" Bill bellowed at Stan, at all of them, and Ben, his head reeling, watched as Bill bent down, coiled, and suddenly flung himself upward. His closed left fist struck nothing, nothing at all, but there was a heavy crr-rack! sound. Plaster dust puffed from a place where there was no longer any ceiling ... and then there was. The hallway was just a hallway again--narrow, low-ceilinged, dirty, but the walls no longer stretched up into forever. There was only Bill, looking at them and nursing his bleeding hand, which was floury with plaster-dust. Overhead was the clear mark his fist had made in the soft plaster of the ceiling.

  "N-N-Not ruh-ruh-real," he said to Stan, to all of them. "Just a f-f-false f-fuh-face. Like a Huh-Huh-Huh-Halloween muh-muh-hask."

  "To you, maybe," Stan said dully. His face was shocked and horrified. He looked around as if no longer sure where he was. Looking at him, smelling the sour reek coming out of his pores, Ben, who had been overjoyed at Bill's victory, got scared all over again. Stan was close to cracking up. Soon he would go into hysterics, begin to scream, perhaps, and what would happen then?

  "To you," Stan said again. "But if I'd tried that, nothing would have happened. Because ... you've got your brother, Bill, but I don't have anything." He looked around--first back toward the parlor, which had taken on a somber brown atmosphere
, so thick and smoggy they could barely see the door through which they had entered it, to this hall, which was bright but somehow dark, somehow filthy, somehow utterly mad. Elves capered on the decaying wallpaper under runners of roses. Sun glared on the panes of the window at the end of the hall, and Ben knew that if they went down there they would see dead flies ... more broken glass ... and then what? The floorboards spreading apart, spilling them into a dead darkness where grasping fingers waited to catch them? Stan was right; God, why had they come into Its lair with nothing but their two stupid silver slugs and a frocking slingshot?

  He saw Stan's panic leap from one of them to the next to the next--like a grassfire driven by a hot wind, it widened in Eddie's eyes, dropped Bev's mouth into a wounded gasp, made Richie push his glasses up with both hands and stare around as if followed from close behind by a fiend.

  They trembled on the brink of flight, Bill's warning to stay together almost forgotten. They were listening to gale-force panicwinds blowing between their ears. As if in a dream Ben heard Miss Davies, the assistant librarian, reading to the little ones: Who is that trip-trapping upon my bridge? And he saw them, the little ones, the babies, leaning forward, their faces still and solemn, their eyes reflecting the eternal fascination of the fairy-story: would the monster be bested ... or would It feed?

  "I don't have anything!" Stan Uris wailed, and he seemed very small, almost small enough to slip through one of the cracks in the hallway's plank flooring like a human letter. "You got your brother, man, but I don't have anything!"

  "You duh-duh-duh-do!" Bill yelled back. He grabbed Stan and Ben felt sure he was going to bust him one and his thoughts moaned, No, Bill, please, that's Henry's way, if you do that It'll kill us all right now!

  But Bill didn't hit Stan. He turned him around with rough hands and tore the paperback from the back pocket of Stan's jeans.

  "Gimme it!" Stan screamed, beginning to cry. The others stood stunned, shrinking away from Bill, whose eyes now seemed to actually burn. His forehead glowed like a lamp, and he held the book out to Stan like a priest holding out a cross to ward off a vampire.

  "You guh-guh-got your b-b-bi-bir-bir--"

  He turned his head up, the cords in his neck standing out, his adam's apple like an arrowhead buried in his throat. Ben was filled with both fear and pity for his friend Bill Denbrough; but there was also a strong sense of wonderful relief. Had he doubted Bill? Had any of them? Oh Bill, say it, please, can't you say it?

  And somehow, Bill did. "You got your BUH-BUH-BUH-BIRDS! Your BUH-BUH-BIRDS!"

  He thrust the book at Stan. Stan took it, and looked at Bill dumbly. Tears glimmered on his cheeks. He held the book so tightly that his fingers were white. Bill looked at him, then at the others.

  "Cuh-cuh-home on," he said again.

  "Will the birds work?" Stan asked. His voice was low, husky.

  "They worked in the Standpipe, didn't they?" Bev asked him.

  Stan looked at her uncertainly.

  Richie clapped him on the shoulder. "Come on, Stankid," he said. "Is you a man or is you a mouse?"

  "I must be a man," Stan said shakily, and wiped tears from his face with the heel of his left hand. "So far as I know, mice don't shit their pants."

  They laughed and Ben could have sworn he felt the house pulling away from them, from that sound. Mike turned.

  "That big room. The one we just came through. Look!"

  They looked. The parlor was now almost black. It was not smoke, or any kind of gas; it was just blackness, a nearly solid blackness. The air had been robbed of its light. The blackness seemed to roll and flex as they stared into it, to almost coalesce into faces.

  "Come oh-oh-on."

  They turned away from the black and walked down the hall. Three doors opened off it, two with dirty white porcelain doorknobs, the third with only a hole where the knob's shaft had been. Bill grabbed the first knob, turned it, and pushed the door open. Bev crowded up next to him, raising the Bullseye.

  Ben drew back, aware that the others were doing the same, crowding behind Bill like frightened quail. It was a bedroom, empty save for one stained mattress. The rusty ghosts of the coils in a box-spring long departed were tattooed into the mattress's yellow hide. Outside the room's one window, sunflowers dipped and nodded.

  "There's nothing--" Bill began, and then the mattress began to bulge in and out rhythmically. It suddenly ripped straight down the middle. A black sticky fluid began to spill out, staining the mattress and then running over the floor toward the doorway. It came in long ropy tendrils.

  "Shut it, Bill!" Richie shouted. "Shut the fuckin door!"

  Bill slammed it shut, looked around at them, and nodded. "Come on." He had barely touched the knob of the second door--this one on the other side of the narrow hall--when the buzzing scream began behind the cheap wood.

  9

  Even Bill drew back from that rising, inhuman cry. Ben felt the sound might drive him mad; his mind visualized a giant cricket behind the door, like something from a movie where radiation made all the bugs get big--The Beginning of the End, maybe, or The Black Scorpion, or that one about the ants in the Los Angeles stormdrains. He could not have run even if that buzzing rugose horror had splintered the panels of the door and begun caressing him with its great hairy legs. Beside him, he was dimly aware that Eddie was breathing in hacking gasps.

  The scream rose in pitch, never losing that buzzing, insectile quality. Bill fell back another step, no blood in his face now, his eyes bulging, his lips only a purple scar below his nose.

  "Shoot it, Beverly!" Ben heard himself cry. "Shoot it through the door, shoot it before it can get us!" And the sun fell through the dirty window at the end of the hall, a heavy feverish weight.

  Beverly raised the Bullseye like a girl in a dream as the buzzing scream rose louder, louder, louder--

  But before she could pull the sling back, Mike was shouting: "No! No! Don't, Bev! Oh gosh! I'll be dipped!" And incredibly, Mike was laughing. He pushed forward, grabbed the knob, turned it, and shoved the door open. It came free of the swollen jamb with a brief grinding noise. "It's a mooseblower! Just a mooseblower, that's all, something to scare the crows!"

  The room was an empty box. Lying on the floor was a Sterno can with both ends cut off. In the middle, strung tight and knotted outside holes punched in the can's sides, was a waxed length of string. Although there was no breeze in the room--the one window was shut and indifferently boarded over, letting light pass only in chinks and rays--there could be no doubt that the buzzing was coming from the can.

  Mike walked to it and fetched it a solid kick. The buzzing stopped as the can tumbled into a far corner.

  "Just a mooseblower," he said to the others, as if apologizing. "We put em on the scarecrows. It's nothing. Only a cheap trick. But I ain't a crow." He looked at Bill, not laughing anymore but smiling still. "I'm still scared of It--I guess we all are--but It's scared of us, too. Tell you the truth, I think It's scared pretty bad."

  Bill nodded. "I-I do, too," he said.

  They went down to the door at the end of the hall, and as Ben watched Bill hook his finger into the hole where the doorknob's shaft had been, he understood that this was where it was going to end; there would be no trick behind this door. The smell was worse now, and that thundery feeling of two opposing powers swirling around them was much stronger. He glanced at Eddie, one arm in a sling, his good hand clutching his aspirator. He looked at Bev on his other side, white-faced, holding the slingshot up like a wishbone. He thought: If we have to run, I'll try to protect you, Beverly. I swear I'll try.

  She might have sensed his thought, because she turned toward him and offered him a strained smile. Ben smiled back.

  Bill pulled the door open. Its hinges uttered a dull scream and then were silent. It was a bathroom ... but something was wrong with it. Someone broke something in here was all that Ben could make out at first. Not a booze bottle ... what?

  White chips and shards, glimmering wickedl
y, lay strewn everywhere. Then he understood. It was the crowning insanity. He laughed. Richie joined him.

  "Somebody must have let the granddaddy of all farts," Eddie said, and Mike began to giggle and nod his head. Stan was smiling a little. Only Bill and Beverly remained grim.

  The white pieces littered across the floor were shards of porcelain. The toilet-bowl had exploded. The tank stood drunkenly at an angle in a puddle of water, saved from falling over by the fact that the toilet had been placed in one corner of the room and the tank had landed kitty-corner.

  They crowded in behind Bill and Beverly, their feet gritting on bits of porcelain. Whatever it was, Ben thought, it blew that poor toilet right to hell. He had a vision of Henry Bowers dropping two or three of his M-80s into it, slamming the lid down, then bugging out in a hurry. He couldn't think of anything else short of dynamite that would have done such a cataclysmic job. There were a few chunks, but damned few; most of what was left were tiny sharp slivers like blowgun darts. The wallpaper (rose-runners and capering elves, as in the hall) was peppered with holes all the way around the room. It looked like shotgun blasts but Ben knew it was more porcelain, driven into the walls by the force of the explosion.

  There was a bathtub standing on claw feet with generations of grimy toe-jam between the blunt talons. Ben peeked into it and saw a tidal-flat of silt and grit on the bottom. A rusty showerhead glared down from above. There was a basin and a medicine cabinet standing ajar above it, disclosing empty shelves. There were small rust-rings on these shelves, where bottles had once stood.

  "I wouldn't get too close to that, Big Bill!" Richie said sharply, and Ben looked around.

  Bill was approaching the mouth of the drainhole in the floor, over which the toilet had once sat. He leaned toward it ... and then turned back to the others.

  "I can h-h-hear the puh-pumping muh-muh-machinery ... just like in the Buh-Buh-harrens!"

  Bev drew closer to Bill. Ben followed her, and yes, he could hear it: that steady thrumming noise. Except, echoing up through the pipes, it didn't sound like machinery at all. It sounded like something alive.

  "Th-Th-This is w-w-where It cuh-cuh-hame fr-from," Bill said. His face was still deadly pale, but his eyes were alight with excitement. "This is w-where It cuh-hame from that d-d-day, and th-hat's w-w-where It a-a-always comes fr-rom! The druh-druh-drains!"