It (169 page)

We have to make sure! If It's dying or gone back to where It came from, where the rest of It is, that's fine. But what if It's just hurt? What if It can get better? What—

Stan's shriek cut across his thoughts like broken glass. In the fading light Bill saw that one of the strands of webbing had come down on Stan's shoulder. Before Bill could reach him, Mike had thrown himself at the smaller boy in a flying tackle. He drove Stan away and the piece of webbing snapped back, taking a piece of Stan's polo shirt with it.

“Get back!” Ben yelled at them.
“Get away from it, it's all coming down!”
He seized Beverly's hand and pulled her back toward the child-sized door while Stan struggled to his feet, looked dazedly around, and then grabbed Eddie. The two of them started toward
Ben and Beverly, helping each other, looking like phantoms in the fading light.

Overhead, the spiderweb was drooping, collapsing on itself, losing its fearful symmetry. Bodies twirled lazily in the air like nightmarish plumb-bobs. Cross-strands fell in like the rotted rungs of some strange complex of ladders. Severed strands hit the stone flagging, hissed like cats, lost their shape, began to run.

Mike Hanlon wove his way through them as he would later weave his way through the opposing lines of nearly a dozen high-school football teams, head down, ducking and dodging. Richie joined him. Incredibly, Richie was laughing, although his hair was standing straight up on his head like the quills of a porcupine. The light grew dimmer, the phosphorescence that had coiled on the walls now dying away.

“Bill!” Mike shouted. “Come on! Get the frock out of there!”

“What if It's not dead?”
Bill screamed back.
“We got to go after It, Mike! We got to make sure!”

A
snarl of webbing sagged outward like a parachute and then fell with a nasty ripping sound that was like skin being pulled apart. Mike grabbed Bill's arm and pulled him, stumbling, out of the way.

“It's dead!” Eddie cried, joining them. His eyes were febrile lamps, his breathing a chilly winter-whistle in his throat. Fallen strands of webbing had sizzled complex scars into the plaster of Paris of his cast. “I heard It, It was dying, you don't sound like that if you're on your way to a sock hop, It was dying, I'm sure of it!”

Richie's hands groped out of the darkness, seized Bill, and pulled him into a rough embrace. He began to pound Bill's back ecstatically. “I heard It, too—It was dying, Big Bill! It was dying . . .
and you're not stuttering! Not at all!
Howdja do it? How in the hell—?”

Bill's brain was whirling. Exhaustion tugged at him with thick and clumsy hands. He could not remember ever feeling this tired . . . but in his mind he heard the drawling, almost weary voice of the Turtle:
I'd finish it now; don't let It get away. . . . what can be done when you're eleven can often never be done again.

“But we have to be sure—”

The shadows were joining hands and now the darkness was almost complete. But before the light failed utterly, he thought he saw the
same hellish doubt on Beverly's face . . . and in Stan's eyes. And still, as the last of the light gave way, they could hear the tenebrous whisper-shudder-thump of Its unspeakable web falling to pieces.

Bill in the Void/Late

—well here you are again, Little Buddy! but what's happened to your hair? you're just as bald as a cueball! sad! what sad, short lives humans live! each life a short pamphlet written by an idiot! tut-tut, and all that

I'm still Bill Denbrough. You killed my brother and you killed Stan the Man, you tried to kill Mike. And I'm going to tell you something: this time I'm not going to stop until the job's done

—the Turtle was stupid, too stupid to lie. he told you the truth, Little Buddy . . . the time only comes around once. you hurt me . . . you surprised me. never again. I am the one who called you back. I.

You called, all right, but You weren't the only one

—your friend the Turtle . . . he died a few years ago. the old idiot puked inside his shell and choked to death on a galaxy or two. very sad, don't you think? but also quite bizarre. deserves a place in
Ripley's Believe It or Not,
that's what I think. happened right around the same time you had that writer's block. you must have felt him go, Little Buddy

I don't believe that, either

—oh you'll believe . . . you'll see. this time, Little Buddy, I intend you to see everything, including the deadlights

He sensed Its voice rising, buzzing and racketing—at last he sensed the full extent of Its fury, and he was terrified. He reached for the tongue of Its mind, concentrating, trying desperately to recapture the full extent of that childish belief, understanding at the same time that there was a deadly truth in what It had said: last time It had been unprepared. This time . . . well, even if It had not been the only one to call them, It sure had been waiting.

But still—

He felt his own fury, clean and singing, as his eyes fixed on Its eyes. He sensed Its old scars, sensed that It had truly been hurt, and that It was still hurt.

And as It threw him, as he felt his mind swatted out of his body,
he concentrated all of his being on seizing Its tongue
 . . . and missed his grip.

Richie

The other four watched, paralyzed. It was an exact replay of what had happened before—at first. The Spider, which seemed about to seize Bill and gobble him up, grew suddenly still. Bill's eyes locked with Its ruby ones. There was a sense of contact . . . a contact just beyond their ability to divine. But they felt the struggle, the clash of wills.

Then Richie glanced up into the new web, and saw the first difference.

There were bodies there, some half-eaten and half-rotted, and that was the same . . . but high up, in one corner, was another body, and Richie was sure this one was still fresh, possibly even still alive. Beverly had not looked up—her eyes were fixed on Bill and the Spider—but even in his terror, Richie saw the resemblance between Beverly and the woman in the web. Her hair was long and red. Her eyes were open but glassy and unmoving. A line of spittle had run from the left corner of her mouth down to her chin. She had been attached to one of the web's main cables by a gossamer harness that went around her waist and under both arms so that she lolled forward in a half-bow, arms and legs dangling limply. Her feet were bare.

Richie saw another body crumpled at the foot of her web, a man he had never seen before . . . and yet his mind registered an almost subconscious resemblance to the late unlamented Henry Bowers. Blood had run from both of the stranger's eyes and caked in a foam around his mouth and on his chin. He—

Then Beverly was screaming.
“Something's wrong! Something's gone wrong, do something, for Christ's sake won't somebody DO something—”

Richie's gaze snapped back to Bill and the Spider . . . and he sensed/heard monstrous laughter. Bill's face was stretching in some subtle way. His skin had gone parchment-sallow, as shiny as the skin of a very old person. His eyes were rolled up to the whites.

Oh Bill, where are you?

As Richie watched, blood suddenly burst from Bill's nose in a
foam. His mouth was writhing, trying to scream . . . and now the Spider was advancing on him again. It was turning, presenting Its stinger.

It means to kill him . . . kill his body, anyway . . . while his mind is somewhere else. It means to shut him out forever. It's winning . . . Bill, where are you? For Christ's sake, where are you?

And somewhere, faintly, from some unimaginable distance, he heard Bill scream . . . and the words, although meaningless, were crystal-clear and full of sickening

(the Turtle is dead oh God the Turtle really is dead)

despair.

Bev shrieked again and put her hands to her ears as if to shut out that fading voice. The Spider's stinger rose and Richie bolted at It, a grin spreading up toward his ears, and he called out in his best Irish Cop's Voice:

“Here, here, me foine girl! Just what in the hell do ye think ye're doin? Belay that guff before I snatch yer pettiskirts and snap yer smithy riddles!”

The Spider stopped laughing, and Richie felt a rising howl of anger and pain inside Its head.
Hurt It!
he thought triumphantly.
Hurt It, how about that, hurt It, and guess what? I'VE GOT ITS TONGUE! I THINK BILL MISSED IT SOMEHOW BUT WHILE IT WAS DISTRACTED I GOT—

Then, screaming at him, Its cries a hive of furious bees in his head, Richie was whacked out of himself and into darkness, dimly aware that It was trying to shake him loose. It was doing a pretty good job, too. Terror washed through him, and then was replaced by a sense of cosmic absurdity. He remembered Beverly with his Duncan yo-yo, showing him how to make it sleep, walk the dog, go around the world. And now here he was, Richie the Human Yo-Yo, and Its tongue was the string. Here he was, and this wasn't called walking the dog but maybe walking the Spider, and if that wasn't funny, what was?

Richie laughed. It wasn't polite to laugh with your mouth full, of course, but he doubted if anybody out here read Miss Manners.

That got him laughing again, and he bit in harder.

The Spider screamed and shook him furiously, howling Its anger at being surprised again—It had believed only the writer would challenge
It, and now this man who was laughing like a crazy boy had seized It when It was least prepared.

Richie felt himself slipping.

—hold eet a secon, senhorrita, we ees goin out here together or I ain gonna sell you no tickets in
la lotería
after all, and every one is a big winner, I swear on my mamma's name

He felt his teeth catch again, more firmly this time. And there was a fainting sort of pain as It drove Its fangs into his own tongue. Boy, it was still pretty funny, though. Even in the dark, being hurled after Bill with only the tongue of this unspeakable monster left to connect him to his own world, even with the pain of Its poisonous fangs suffusing his mind like a red fog, it was pretty goddamned funny.
Check it out, folks. You'll believe a disc jockey can fly.

He was flying, all right.

Richie was in greater darkness than he had ever known, than he had ever suspected might exist, travelling at what felt like the speed of light, and being shaken as a terrier shakes a rat. He sensed that there was something up ahead, some titanic corpse. The Turtle he had heard Bill lamenting in his fading voice? Must be. It was only a shell, a dead husk. Then he was past, rushing on into the darkness.

Really steaming now,
he thought, and felt that wild urge to cackle again.

bill! bill, can you hear me?

—he's gone, he's in the deadlights, let me go! LET ME GO!

(richie?)

Incredibly distant; incredibly far out in the black.

bill! bill! here I am! catch hold! for God's sake catch hold

—he's dead, you're all dead, you're too old, don't you understand that? now let me GO!

hey bitch, you're never too old to rock and roll

—LET ME GO!

take me to him and maybe I will

Richie

—closer, he was closer now, thank God—

here I come, Big Bill! Richie to the rescue! Gonna save your old cracked ass! Owe you one from that day on Neibolt Street, remember?

—let me GOOOO!

It was hurting badly now, and Richie understood how completely he had caught It by surprise—It had believed It had only Bill to deal with. Well, good. Good 'nuff. Richie didn't care about killing It right now; he was no longer sure It
could
be killed. But
Bill
could be killed, and Richie sensed that Bill's time was now very, very short. Bill was closing in on some large nasty surprise out here, something best not thought about.

Richie, no! Go back! It's the edge of everything up here! The deadlights!

souns like what you turn on when you drivinn you hearse at midnie, senhorr . . . and where is you, honeychile? smile, so I can see where you is!

And suddenly Bill was there, skidding along on

(the left? right? there was no direction here)

one side or the other. And beyond him, coming up fast, Richie could see/sense something that finally dried up his laughter. It was a barrier, something of a strange, non-geometrical shape that his mind could not grasp. Instead his mind translated it as best it could, as it had translated the shape of It into a Spider, allowing Richie to think of it as a colossal gray wall made of fossilized wooden stakes. These stakes went forever up and forever down, like the bars of a cage. And from between them shone a great blind light. It glared and moved, smiled and snarled. The light was alive.

(deadlights)

More than alive: it was full of a force—magnetism, gravity, perhaps something else. Richie felt himself lifted and dropped, swirled and pulled, as if he were shooting a fast throat of rapids in an innertube. He could feel the light moving eagerly over his face . . . and the light was
thinking.

This is It, this is It, the rest of It.

—let me go, you promised to let me GO

I know but sometimes, honeychile, I lie—my mamma she beat me fo it but my daddy, he done just about give up

He sensed Bill tumbling and flailing toward one of the gaps in the wall, sensed evil fingers of light reaching for him, and with a final despairing effort, he reached for his friend.