It (174 page)

The Spider's shriek filled Bill's head, seeming to splinter his brains. He felt his fist plunge deep into writhing wetness. His arm followed it in up to the shoulder. He pulled it back, dripping with the Spider's black blood. Ichor poured from the hole he had made.

He saw Richie standing almost beneath Its bloated body, covered
with Its darkly sparkling blood, standing in the classic boxer's stance, his dripping fists pumping.

The Spider lashed at them with Its legs. Bill felt one of them rip down his side, parting his shirt, parting skin. Its stinger pumped uselessly against the floor. Its screams were clarion-bells in his head. It lunged clumsily forward, trying to bite him, and instead of retreating Bill drove forward, using not just his fist now but his whole body, making himself into a torpedo. He ran into Its gut like a sprinting fullback who lowers his shoulders and simply drives straight ahead.

For a moment he felt Its stinking flesh simply give, as if it would rebound and send him flying. With an inarticulate scream he drove harder, pushing forward and upward with his legs, digging at It with his hands. And he broke through; was inundated with Its hot fluids. They ran across his face, in his ears. He snuffled them up his nose in thin squirming streams.

He was in the black again, up to his shoulders inside Its convulsing body. And in his clogged ears he could hear a sound like the steady
whack-WHACK-whack-WHACK
of a big bass drum, the one that leads the parade when the circus comes to town with its complement of freaks and strutting capering clowns.

The sound of Its heart.

He heard Richie scream in sudden pain, a sound that rose into a quick, gasping moan and was cut off. Bill suddenly thrust both fisted hands forward. He was choking, strangling in Its pulsing bag of guts and waters.

Whack-WHACK-whack-WHACK—

He plunged his hands into It, ripping, tearing, parting, seeking the source of the sound; rupturing organs, his slimed fingers opening and closing, his locked chest seeming to swell from lack of air.

Whack-WHACK-whack-WHACK—

And suddenly it was in his hands, a great living thing that pumped and pulsed against his palms, pushing them back and forth.

(NONONONONONONO)

Yes!
Bill cried, choking, drowning.
Yes! Try this, you bitch! TRY THIS ONE OUT! DO YOU LIKE IT? DO YOU LOVE IT? DO YOU?

He laced his fingers together over the pulsing narthex of Its heart, palms spread apart in an inverted V—and brought them together with all the force he could muster.

There was one final shriek of pain and fear as Its heart exploded between his hands, running out between his fingers in jittering strings.

Whack-WHACK-whack-WHA

The scream, fading, dwindling. Bill felt Its body clench around him suddenly, like a fist in a slick glove. Then everything loosened. He became aware that Its body was tilting, slipping slowly off to one side. At the same time he began pulling back, his consciousness leaving him.

The Spider collapsed on Its side, a huge bundle of steaming alien meat, Its legs still quivering and jerking, caressing the sides of the tunnel and scraping across the floor in random scrawls.

Bill staggered away, breathing in whooping gasps, spitting in an effort to clear his mouth of Its horrible taste. He tripped over his own feet and fell to his knees.

And clearly, he heard the Voice of the Other; the Turtle might be dead, but whatever had invested it was not.

“Son, you did real good.”

Then it was gone. The power went with it. He felt weak, revulsed, half-insane. He looked over his shoulder and saw the dying black nightmare of the Spider, still jerking and quivering.

“Richie!”
He cried out in a hoarse, breaking voice.
“Richie, where are you, man?”

No answer.

The light was gone now. It had died with the Spider. He fumbled in the pocket of his matted shirt for the last book of matches. They were there, but they wouldn't light; the heads were soaked with blood.

“Richie!”
he screamed again, beginning to weep now. He began to crawl forward, first one hand and then the other groping in the dark. At last one of them struck something which yielded limply to his touch. His hands flew over it . . . and stopped as they touched Richie's face.

“Richie! Richie!”

Still no answer. Struggling in the dark, Bill got one arm under Richie's back and the other under his knees. He wobbled to his feet and began to stumble back the way they had come with Richie in his arms.

Derry/10:00–10:15
A.M.

At 10:00 the steady vibration which had been running through Derry's downtown streets increased to a rumbling roar. The Derry
News
would later write that the supports of the Canal's underground portion, weakened by the savage assault of what amounted to a flash flood, simply collapsed. There were, however, people who disagreed with that view. “I was there, I know,” Harold Gardener later told his wife. “It wasn't just that the Canal's supports collapsed. It was an
earthquake,
that's what it was. It was a fucking
earthquake.”

Either way, the results were the same. As the rumbling built steadily up and up, windows began to shatter, plaster ceilings began to fall, and the inhuman cry of twisting beams and foundations swelled into a frightening chorus. Cracks raced up the bullet-pocked brick façade of Machen's like grasping hands. The cables holding the marquee of the Aladdin Theater out over the street snapped and the marquee came crashing down. Richard's Alley, which ran behind the Center Street Drug, suddenly filled up with an avalanche of yellow brick as the Brian X Dowd Professional Building, erected in 1952, came crashing down. A huge screen of jaundice-colored dust rose in the air and was snatched away like a veil.

At the same time the statue of Paul Bunyan in front of the City Center exploded. It was as if that long-ago art teacher's threat to blow it up had finally proved to be dead serious after all. The bearded grinning head rose straight up in the air. One leg kicked forward, the other back, as if Paul had attempted some sort of a split so enthusiastic it had resulted in dismemberment. The statue's midsection blew out in a cloud of shrapnel and the head of the plastic axe rose into the rainy sky, disappeared, and then came down again, twirling end over end. It sheared through the roof of the Kissing Bridge, and then its floor.

And then, at 10:02
A.M.
, downtown Derry simply collapsed.

Most of the water from the ruptured Standpipe had crossed Kansas Street and ended up in the Barrens, but tons of it rushed down into the business district by way of Up-Mile Hill. Perhaps that was the straw that broke the camel's back . . . or perhaps, as Harold Gardener told his wife, there really
was
an earthquake. Cracks raced across the surface
of Main Street. They were narrow at first . . . and then they began to gape like hungry mouths and the sound of the Canal floated up, not muffled now but frighteningly loud. Everything began to shake. The neon sign proclaiming
OUTLET MOCCASINS
in front of Shorty Squires's souvenir shop hit the street and shorted out in three feet of water. A moment or two later, Shorty's building, which stood next to Mr. Paperback, began to
descend.
Buddy Angstrom was the first to see this phenomenon. He elbowed Alfred Zitner, who looked, gaped, and then elbowed Harold Gardener. Within a space of seconds the sandbagging operation stopped. The men lining both sides of the Canal only stood and stared toward downtown in the pouring rain, their faces stamped with identical expressions of horrified wonder. Squires's Souvenirs and Sundries appeared to have been built on some huge elevator which was now on the way down. It sank into the apparently solid concrete with ponderous stately dignity. When it came to a stop, you could have dropped to your hands and knees on the flooded sidewalk and entered through one of the third-floor windows. Water sprayed up all around the building, and a moment later Shorty himself appeared on the roof, waving his arms madly for rescue. Then he was obliterated as the office-building next door, the one which housed Mr. Paperback at ground level, also sank into the ground. Unfortunately, this one did not go straight down as Shorty's building had done; the Mr. Paperback building developed a marked lean (for a moment, in fact, it bore a strong resemblance to that fucked-up tower in Pisa, the one on the macaroni boxes). As it tilted, bricks began to shower from its top and sides. Shorty was struck by several. Harold Gardener saw him reel backward, hands to his head . . . and then the top three floors of the Mr. Paperback building slid off as neatly as pancakes from the top of a stack. Shorty disappeared. Someone on the sandbag line screamed, and then everything was lost in the grinding roar of destruction. Men were knocked off their feet or sent wobbling and staggering back from the Canal. Harold Gardener saw the buildings which faced each other across Main Street lean forward, like ladies kibbitzing over a card-game, their heads almost touching. The street itself was sinking, cracking, breaking up. Water splashed and sprayed. And then, one after another, buildings on both sides of the street simply swayed past their centers of gravity and crashed into the street—the Northeast Bank, The Shoeboat, Alvey's Smokes 'n Jokes, Bailley's Lunch, Bandler's
Record and Music Barn. Except that by then there was really no street for them to crash into. The street had fallen into the Canal, stretching like taffy at first and then breaking up into bobbing chunks of asphalt. Harold saw the traffic-island at the three-street intersection suddenly drop out of sight, and as water geysered up, he suddenly understood what was going to happen.

“Gotta get out of here!”
he screamed at Al Zitner.
“It's gonna backwater! Al! It's gonna backwater!”

Al Zitner gave no sign that he had heard. His was the face of a sleepwalker, or perhaps of a man who has been deeply hypnotized. He stood in his soaked red-and-blue-checked sportcoat, in his open-collared Lacoste shirt with the little alligator on the left boob, in his blue socks with the crossed white golf-clubs knitted into their sides, in his brown L. L. Bean's boat shoes with the rubber soles. He was watching perhaps a million dollars of his own personal investments sinking into the street, three or four millions of his friends' investments—the guys he played poker with, the guys he golfed with, the guys he skied with at his time-sharing condo in Rangely. Suddenly his home town, Derry,
Maine,
for Christ's sake, looked bizarrely like that fucked-up city where the wogs pushed people around in those long skinny canoes. Water roiled and boiled between the buildings that were still standing. Canal Street ended in a jagged black diving board over the edge of a churning lake. It was really no wonder Zitner hadn't heard Harold. Others, however, had come to the same conclusion Gardener had come to—you couldn't drop that much shit into a raging body of water without causing a lot of trouble. Some dropped the sandbags they had been holding and took to their heels. Harold Gardener was one of these, and so he lived. Others were not so lucky and were still somewhere in the general area as the Canal, its throat now choked with tons of asphalt, concrete, brick, plaster, glass, and about four million dollars' worth of assorted merchandise, backsurged and poured over its concrete sleeve, carrying away men and sandbags impartially. Harold kept thinking it meant to have him; no matter how fast he ran the water kept gaining. He finally escaped by clawing his way up a steep embankment covered with shrubbery. He looked back once and saw a man he believed to be Roger Lernerd, the head loan officer at Harold's credit union, trying to start his car in the parking-lot of the Canal Mini-Mall. Even over the roar of
the water and the bellowing wind, Harold could hear the K-car's little sewing-machine engine cranking and cranking and cranking as smooth black water ran rocker-panel high on both sides of it. Then, with a deep thundering cry, the Kenduskeag poured out of its banks and swept both the Canal Mini-Mall and Roger Lernerd's bright red K-car away. Harold began climbing again, grabbing onto branches, roots, anything that looked solid enough to take his weight. Higher ground, that was the ticket. As Andrew Keene might have said, Harold Gardener was really into the concept of higher ground that morning. Behind him he could hear downtown Derry continuing to collapse. The sound was like artillery fire.

Bill

“Beverly!”
he shouted. His back and arms were one solid throbbing ache. Richie now seemed to weigh at least five hundred pounds.
Put him down, then,
his mind whispered.
He's dead, you know damn well he is, so why don't you just put him down?

But he wouldn't, couldn't, do that.

“Beverly!”
he shouted again.
“Ben! Anyone!”

He thought:
This is where It threw me—and Richie—except It threw us farther—so much farther. What was that like? I'm losing it, forgetting . . .

“Bill?” It was Ben's voice, shaky and exhausted, somewhere fairly close. “Where are you?”

“Over here, man. I've got Richie. He got . . . he's hurt.”

“Keep talking.” Ben was closer now. “Keep talking, Bill.”

“We killed It,” Bill said, walking toward where Ben's voice had come from. “We killed the bitch. And if Richie's dead—”

“Dead?”
Ben called, alarmed. He was very close now . . . and then his hand groped out of the dark and pawed lightly at Bill's nose. “What do you mean, dead?”

“I . . . he . . .” They were supporting Richie together now. “I can't see him,” Bill said. “That's the thing. I cuh-cuh-han't
suh-suh-see
him!”