"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 whirled 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 like cables, 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, Stan-kid," 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, nor 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 cm 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 heard 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 wickedly, 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 wicked-looking 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 each blunt talon. 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 pub-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!"
Richie was nodding. "We were in the cellar, but that isn't where It was-It came down the stairs. Because this is where It could get out."
"And It did this?" Beverly asked.
"Ih-It was in a h-h-hurry, I th-think," Bill said gravely.
Ben looked into the pipe. It was about three feet in diameter and dark as a mineshaft. The inner ceramic surface of the pipe was crusted with stuff he didn't want to know about. That thrumming sound floated up hypnotically... and suddenly he saw something. He did not see it with his physical eyes, not at first, but with one buried deep in his mind.
It was rushing toward them, moving at express-train speed, filling the throat of this dark pipe from side to side; It was in Its own form now, whatever that might be; It would take some shape from their minds when It got here. It was coming, coming up from Its own foul runs and black catacombs under the earth, Its eyes glowing a feral yellowish green, coming, coming; It was coming.
And then, at first like sparks, he saw Its eyes down in that darkness. They took shape-flaring and malignant. Over the thrumming sound of the machinery, Ben could now hear a new noise-Whoooooooo... A fetid smell belched from the ragged mouth of the drain-pipe and he fell back, coughing and gagging.
"It's coming!" He screamed. "Bill, I saw It, It's coming!"
Beverly raised the Bullseye. "Good," she said.
Something exploded out of the drainpipe. Ben, trying to recall that first confrontation later, could only remember a silvery-orange shifting shape. It was not ghostly; it was solid, and he sensed some other shape, some real and ultimate shape, behind it... but his eyes could not grasp what he was seeing, not precisely.
Then Richie was stumbling backward, his face a scrawl of terror, screaming over and over again: "The Werewolf! Bill! It's the Werewolf! The Teenage Werewolf." And suddenly the shape locked into reality, for Ben, for all of them. Richie's It became their It.
The Werewolf stood poised over the drainpipe, one hairy foot on either side of where the toilet had once been. Its green eyes glared at them from Its feral face. Its muzzle wrinkled back and yellowish-white foam seeped through Its teeth. It uttered a shattering growl. Its arms pistoned out toward Beverly, the cuffs of Its high-school letter jacket pulling back from Its fur-covered arms. Its smell was hot and raw and murderous.
Beverly screamed. Ben grabbed the back of her blouse and yanked so hard that the seams under the arms tore. One clawed hand swept through the air where she had been only a moment before. Beverly went stumbling backwards against the wall. The silver ball popped out of the cup of the Bullseye. For a moment it glimmered in the air. Mike, quicker than quick, snatched it and gave it back to her.
"Shoot it, baby," he said. His voice was perfectly calm; almost serene. "You shoot it right now."
The Werewolf uttered a shattering roar that became a flesh-freezing howl, Its snout turned up toward the ceiling.
The howl became a laugh. It lunged at Bill as Bill turned to look at Beverly. Ben shoved him aside and Bill went sprawling.
"Shoot It, Bev!" Richie screamed. "For God's sake, shoot It!"
The Werewolf sprang forward, and there was no question in Ben's mind, then or later, that It knew exactly who was in charge here. Bill was the one It was after. Beverly drew and fired. The ball flew and again it was off the mark but this time there was no saving curve. It missed by more than a foot, punching a hole in the wallpaper above the tub. Bill, his arms peppered with bits of porcelain and bleeding in a dozen pieces, uttered a screaming curse.
The Werewolf s head snapped around; its gleaming green eyes considered Beverly. Not thinking, Ben stepped in front of her as she groped in her pocket for the other silver slug. The jeans she wore were too tight. She had donned them with no thought of provocation; it was just that, like the shorts she had worn on the day of Patrick Hockstetter and the refrigerator, she was still wearing last year's model. Her fingers closed on the ball but it squirted away. She groped again and got it. She pulled it, turning her pocket inside out and spilling fourteen cents, the stubs of two Aladdin tickets, and a quantity of pocket-lint onto the floor.
The Werewolf lunged at Ben, who was standing protectively in front of her... and blocking her field of fire. Its head was cocked at the predator's deadly questing angle, its jaws snapping. Ben reached blindly for It. There seemed to be no room in his reactions now for terror-he felt a clear-headed sort of anger instead, mixed with bewilderment and a sense that somehow time had come to a sudden unexpected screech-halt. He snagged his hands in tough matted hair-the pelt, he thought, I've got Its pelt-and he could feel the heavy bone of Its skull beneath. He thrust at that wolvish head with all of his force, but although he was a big boy, it did no good at all. If he had not stumbled back and struck the wall, the thing would have torn his throat open with its teeth.
It came after him, Its greenish-yellow eyes flaring. It growled with each breath. It smelled of the sewer and something else, some wild yet unpleasant odor like rotten hazelnuts. One of Its heavy paws rose and Ben skittered aside as best he could. The paw, tipped with heavy claws, ripped bloodless wounds through the wallpaper and into the cheesy plaster beneath. He could dimly hear Richie bellowing something, Eddie howling at Beverly to shoot it, shoot it. But Beverly did not. This was her only other chance. It didn't matter; she intended that it be the only one she would need. A clear coldness she never saw again in her life fell over her sight. In it everything stood out and forward; never again would she see the three dimensions of reality so clearly denned. She possessed every color, every angle, every distance. Fear departed. She felt the hunter's simple lust of certainty and oncoming consummation. Her pulse slowed. The hysterical trembling grip in which she had been holding the Bullseye loosened, then firmed and became natural. She drew in a deep breath. It seemed to her that her lungs would never fill completely. Dimly, faintly, she heard popping sounds. Didn't matter, whatever they were. She tracked left, waiting for the Werewolfs improbable head to fall with cool perfection into the wishbone beyond the extended V of the drawn-back sling.