It (163 page)

Ben thought it was the smell of the mummy. To Eddie it smelled like the leper. Richie thought it smelled like the world's oldest flannel jacket, now moldering and rotting—a lumberman's jacket, a very big one, big enough for a character like Paul Bunyan, perhaps. To Beverly it smelled like her father's sock-drawer. In Stan Uris it woke a dreadful memory from his earliest childhood—an oddly Jewish memory in a boy who had only the haziest understanding of his own Jewishness. It smelled like clay mixed with oil and made him think of an eyeless, mouthless demon called the Golem, a clay man that renegade Jews were supposed to have raised in the Middle Ages to save them from the
goyim
who robbed them and raped their women and then sent them packing. Mike thought of the dry smell of feathers in a dead nest.

When they finally reached the end of the narrow pipe, they slithered like eels down the curved surface of another which ran at an oblique angle to the one they had been in, and found they could stand
up again. Bill felt the heads of the matches left in the book. Four. His mouth tightened and he resolved not to tell the others how close they were to the end of their light . . . not unless he absolutely had to.

“Huh-Huh-How you g-g-guys d-doin?”

They murmured replies, and he nodded in the dark. No panic, and no tears since Stan's. That was good. He felt for their hands and they stood together in the dark that way for awhile, both taking and giving from the touch. Bill felt clear exultation in this, a sure sense that they were somehow producing more than the sum of their seven selves; they had been re-added into a more potent whole.

He lit one of the remaining matches and they saw a narrow tunnel stretching ahead on a downward slant. The top of this pipe was festooned with sagging cobwebs, some water-broken and hanging in shrouds. Looking at them gave Bill an atavistic chill. The floor here was dry but thick with ancient mold and what might have been leaves, fungus . . . or some unimaginable droppings. Farther up he saw a pile of bones and a drift of green rags. They might once have been that stuff they called “polished cotton,” workman's clothes. Bill imagined some Sewer Department or Water Department worker who had gotten lost, wandered down here, and been discovered. . . .

The match guttered. He tipped its head downward, wanting the light to last a little longer.

“Do y-y-you nuh-know where w-w-we are?” he asked Eddie.

Eddie pointed down the slightly crooked bore of the tunnel. “Canal's that way,” he said. “Less'n half a mile, unless this thing turns in a different direction. We're under Up-Mile Hill right now, I think. But Bill—”

The match burned Bill's fingers and he let it drop. They were in darkness again. Someone—Bill thought it was Beverly—sighed. But before the match had gone out, he had seen the worry on Eddie's face.

“W-W-What? What ih-is it?”

“When I say we're under Up-Mile Hill, I mean we're
really
under it. We been going down for a long time now. Nobody'd
ever
put sewer-pipe in this deep. When you put a tunnel this deep you call it a mine-shaft.”

“How deep do you figure we are, Eddie?” Richie asked.

“Quarter of a mile,” Eddie said. “Maybe more.”

“Jesus-please-us,” Beverly said.

“These aren't sewer-pipes, anyway,” Stan said from behind them. “You can tell by that smell. It's bad, but it's not a
sewery
smell.”

“I think I'd rather smell the sewer,” Ben said. “It smells like—”

A scream floated down to them, issuing from the mouth of the pipe they had just left, lifting the hair on the nape of Bill's neck. The seven of them drew together, clutching each other.

“—gonna get you sons of bitches. We're gonna get youuuuuuu—”

“Henry,” Eddie breathed. “Oh my God, he's still coming.”

“I'm not surprised,” Richie said. “Some people are too stupid to quit.”

They could hear faint panting, the scrape of shoes, the whisper of cloth.

“—youuuuuuuuu—”

“Cuh-Cuh-Come on,” Bill said.

They started down the pipe, now walking double except for Mike, who was at the back of the line: Bill and Eddie, Richie and Bev, Ben and Stan.

“H-H-How fuh-far b-b-back do y-you think H-H-Henry ih-his?”

“I couldn't tell, Big Bill,” Eddie said. “The echoes are bad.” He dropped his voice. “Did you see that pile of bones?”

“Y-Y-Yes,” Bill said, dropping his own voice.

“There was a tool-belt with the clothes. I think it was a Water Department guy.”

“I guh-guess s-s-so.”

“How long you think—?”

“I d-d-don't nuh-nuh-know.”

Eddie closed his good hand over Bill's arm in the darkness.

It was perhaps fifteen minutes later when they heard something coming toward them in the dark.

Richie stopped, frozen cold all the way through. Suddenly he was three years old again. He listened to that squelching, shifting movement—closing in on them, closing—and to the whispering branchlike sounds that accompanied it, and even before Bill struck a match he knew what it would be.

“The Eye!”
he screamed.
“Christ, it's the Crawling Eye!”

For a moment the others were not sure what they were seeing (Beverly had an impression that her father had found her, even down
here, and Eddie had a fleeting vision of Patrick Hockstetter come back to life, somehow Patrick had flanked them and gotten in front of them), but Richie's cry, Richie's
certainty,
froze the shape for all of them. They saw what Richie saw.

A gigantic Eye filled the tunnel, the glassy black pupil two feet across, the iris a muddy russet color. The white was bulgy, membranous, laced with red veins that pulsed steadily. It was a lidless lashless gelatinous horror that moved on a bed of raw-looking tentacles. These fumbled over the tunnel's crumbly surface and sank in like fingers, so that the impression given in the glow of Bill's guttering match was of an Eye that had somehow grown nightmare fingers which were pulling It along.

It stared at them with blank, feverish avarice. The match went out.

In the darkness, Bill felt those branchlike tentacles caress his ankles, his shins . . . but he could not move. His body was frozen solid. He sensed It approaching, he could feel the heat radiating out from It, and could hear the wet pulse of blood wetting Its membranes. He imagined the stickiness he would feel when It touched him and still he could not scream. Even when fresh tentacles slipped around his waist and hooked themselves into the loops of his jeans and began to drag him forward, he could not scream or struggle. A deadly sleepiness seemed to have suffused his whole body.

Beverly felt one of the tentacles slip around the cup of her ear and suddenly draw noose-tight. Pain flared and she was dragged forward, twisting and moaning, as if an old-lady schoolteacher were giving her an out-of-patience come-along to the back of the room, where she would be forced to sit on a stool and wear a duncecap. Stan and Richie tried to back away, but a forest of unseen tentacles now wavered and whispered about them. Ben put an arm around Beverly and tried to tug her back. She clasped his hands with panicky tightness.

“Ben . . . Ben, It's got me. . . .”

“No It don't. . . . Wait . . . I'll pull. . . .”

He pulled with all his might, and Beverly screamed as pain tore through her ear and blood began to flow. A tentacle, dry and hard, scraped over Ben's shirt, paused, then twisted in a painful knot around his shoulder.

Bill put out a hand, and it slapped into a gluey yielding wetness.
The Eye!
his mind screamed.
Oh God I got my hand in the Eye! Oh God! Oh dear sweet God! The Eye! My hand in the Eye!

He began to fight now, but the tentacles drew him forward inexorably. His hand disappeared into that wet avid heat. His forearm. Now his arm was plunged into the Eye up to the elbow. At any moment the rest of his body would come against that sticky surface and he felt that he would go mad in that instant. He fought frantically, chopping at the tentacles with his other hand.

Eddie stood like a boy in a dream, hearing the muffled screams and sounds of struggle as his friends were being pulled in. He sensed the tentacles around him but none had as yet actually landed on him.

Run home!
his mind commanded him quite loudly.
Run home to your mamma, Eddie! You can find the way!

Bill screamed in the dark—a high, despairing sound that was followed by hideous squishings and slobberings.

Eddie's paralysis broke wide open—It was trying to take Big Bill!

“No!”
Eddie bellowed—it was a full-blown roar. One might never have guessed such a Norse-warrior sound could issue from such a thin chest, Eddie Kaspbrak's chest, Eddie Kaspbrak's
lungs,
which were of course afflicted with the most terrible case of asthma in Derry. He bolted forward, jumping over questing tentacles without seeing them, his broken arm thumping his own chest as it swung back and forth in its soggy cast. He fumbled in his pocket and brought out his aspirator.

(acid that's what it tastes like acid acid battery acid)

He collided with Bill Denbrough's back and slammed him aside. There was a watery ripping sound, followed by a low eager mewling that Eddie did not so much hear with his ears as feel with his mind. He raised the aspirator

(acid it's acid if I want it to be so eat it eat it eat)

“BATTERY ACID, FUCKNUTS!”
Eddie screamed, and triggered off a blast. At the same time he kicked at the Eye. His foot went deep into the jelly of Its cornea. There was a gush of hot fluid over his leg. He pulled his foot back, only dimly aware that he had lost his shoe.

“FUCK OFF! CRAM IT, SAM! GO AWAY, JOSE! GET LOST! FUCK OFF!”

He felt tentacles touch him, but tentatively. He triggered the aspirator
again, coating the Eye, and felt/heard that mewling again . . . now a hurt, surprised sound.

“Fight It!”
Eddie raved at the others.
“It's just a fucking Eye! Fight It! You hear me? Fight It, Bill! Kick the shit out of the sucker! Jesus Christ you fucking pussies I'm doing the Mashed Potatoes all over It AND I GOT A BROKEN ARM!”

Bill felt his strength return. He ripped his dripping arm out of the Eye . . . and then slammed it, fist-first, back in. A moment later Ben was beside him. He ran into the Eye, grunted with surprise and disgust, and then began to rain punches onto its jellied quivering surface.
“Let her go!”
he yelled.
“You hear me? Let her go! Get outta here! Get outta here!”

“Just an Eye! Just a fucking Eye!”
Eddie was screaming deliriously. He triggered his aspirator again and felt It draw back. The tentacles which had settled on him now dropped away.
“Richie! Richie! Get it! It's just an Eye!”

Richie stumbled forward, unable to believe he was doing this, actually approaching the worst, most terrible monster in the world. But he was.

He only threw a single weak punch, and the feel of his fist sinking into the Eye—it was thick and wet and somehow gristly—made him throw his guts up in one big tasteless convulsion. A sound came out of him—
glurt!—
and the thought that he'd actually puked
on
the Eye caused him to do it again. It was only a single punch, but since he had created this particular monster, perhaps that was all that was necessary. Suddenly the tentacles were gone. They could hear It withdrawing . . . and then the only sounds were Eddie panting and Beverly crying softly, one hand to her bleeding ear.

Bill struck one of their three remaining matches and they stared at each other with dazed, shocked faces. Bill's left arm was running with a thick, cloudy goo that looked like a mixture of partially congealed eggwhite and snot. Blood was trickling slowly down the side of Beverly's neck, and there was a fresh cut on Ben's cheek. Richie slowly pushed his glasses up on his nose.

“A-A-Are we all ruh-ruh-right?” Bill asked hoarsely.

“Are
you,
Bill?” Richie asked.

“Y-Y-Yeah.” He turned to Eddie and hugged the smaller boy with fierce intensity. “You suh-suh-saved my luh-life, man.”

“It ate your
shoe,”
Beverly said, and uttered a wild laugh. “Isn't that too
bad.”

“I'll buy you a new pair of Keds when we get out of here,” Richie said. He clapped Eddie on the back in the dark. “How did you do it, Eddie?”

“Shot it with my aspirator. Pretended it was acid. That's how it tastes after awhile if I'm having, you know, a bad day. Worked great.”

“ ‘I'm doing the Mashed Potatoes all over It AND I GOT A BROKEN ARM,' ” Richie said, and giggled madly. “Not too shabby, Eds. Actually pretty chuckalicious, tell you what.”

“I hate it when you call me Eds.”

“I know,” Richie said, hugging him tightly, “but somebody has to toughen you up, Eds. When you stop leading the sheltered igs-zistence of a child and grow up, you gonna, Ah say, Ah say you gonna find out life ain't always this easy, boy!”

Eddie began to shriek with laughter. “That's the shittiest Voice I ever heard, Richie.”

“Well, keep that aspirator thing handy,” Beverly said. “We might need it again.”

“You didn't see It anywhere?” Mike asked. “When you lit the match?”

“Ih-Ih-It's g-g-gone,” Bill said, and then added grimly: “But we're getting close to It. To the pluh-hace where Ih-It stuh-stuh-stays. And I th-think we h-h-hurt Ih-hit th-that time.”

“Henry's still coming,” Stan said. His voice was low and hoarse. “I can hear him back there.”

“Then let's move out,” Ben said.