They went on toward the sound of the water, and in the thick knee-high groundmist, Richie was unable to tell if his feet were touching the ground or not. They came to a place where both the mist and the ground stopped. Richie looked, unbelieving. This was not the Kenduskeag-and yet it was. The stream boiled and roiled through a narrow watercourse cut through that same crumbly rock-looking across to the far side, he could see ages cut into those stacked layers of stone, red and then orange and then red again. You couldn't walk across this stream on stepping-stones; you'd need a rope bridge, and if you fell in you would be swept away at once. The sound of the water was the sound of bitter foolish anger, and as Richie watched, slack-jawed, he saw a pinkish-silver fish jump in an impossibly high arc, snapping at the bugs that made shifting clouds just above the surface of the water. It splashed down again, giving Richie just time enough to register its presence, and to realize he had never seen a fish exactly like that in his whole life, not even in a book.

Birds flocked across the sky, squalling harshly. Not a dozen or two dozen; for a moment the sky was so dark with birds that they blotted out the sun. Something else crashed through the bushes, and then more things. Richie wheeled, his heart thudding painfully in his chest, and saw something that looked like an antelope flash by, heading southeast.

Something's going to happen. And they know it.

The birds passed, presumably alighting somewhere en masse farther south. Another animal crashed by them... and another. Then there was silence except for the steady rumble of the Kenduskeag. The silence had a waiting quality about it, a pregnant quality Richie didn't like. He felt the hairs shifting and trying to stand up on the back of his neck and he groped for Mike's hand again.

Do you know where we are? he shouted at Mike. You got the word? Jesus, yes! Mike shouted back. I got it! This is ago, Richie! Ago!

Richie nodded. Ago, as in once upon a time, long long ago, when we all lived in the forest and nobody lived anywhere else. They were in the Barrens as they had been God knew how many thousands of years ago. They were in some unimaginable past before the ice age, when New England had been as tropical as South America was today... if there still was a today. He looked around again, nervously, almost expecting to see a brontosaurus raise its cranelike neck against the sky and stare down at them, its mouth full of mud and dripping uprooted plants, or a saber-toothed tiger come stalking out of the undergrowth.

But there was only that silence, as in the five or ten minutes before a vicious thundersquall strikes, when the purple heads stack up and up in the sky overhead and the light turns a queer, bruised purple-yellow and the wind dies completely and you can smell a thick aroma like overcharged car batteries in the air.

We're in the ago, a million years back, maybe, or ten million, or eighty million, but here we are and something's going to happen, I don't know what but something and I'm scared I want it to end I want to be back and Bill please Bill please pull us out it's like we fell into the picture some picture please please help -

Mike's hand tightened on his and he realized that now the silence had been broken. There was a steady low vibration-he could feel it more than hear it, working against the tight flesh of his eardrums, buzzing the tiny bones that conducted the sound. It grew steadily. It had no tone; it simply was:

(the word in the beginning was the word the world the)

a tuneless, soulless sound. He groped for the tree they stood near and as his hand touched it, cupped the curve of the bole, he could feel the vibration caught inside. At the same moment he realized he could feel it in his feet, a steady tingling that went up his ankles and calves to his knees, turning his tendons into tuning forks.

It grew. And grew.

It was coming out of the sky. Not wanting to but unable to help himself, Richie turned his face up. The sun was a molten coin burning a circle in the low-hanging overcast, surrounded by a fairy-ring of moisture. Below it, the verdant green slash that was the Barrens lay utterly still. Richie thought he understood what this vision was: they were about to see the coming of It.

The vibration took on a voice-a rumbling roar that built to a shattering crescendo of sound. He clapped his hands to his ears and screamed and could not hear himself scream. Beside him, Mike Hanlon was doing the same, and Richie saw that Mike's nose was bleeding a little.

The clouds in the west lit with a bloom of red fire. It traced its way toward them, widening from an artery to a stream to a river of ominous color; and then, as a burning, falling object broke through the cloud cover, the wind came. It was hot and searing, smoky and suffocating. The thing in the sky was gigantic, a flaming match-head that was nearly too bright to look at. Arcs of electricity bolted from it, blue bullwhips that flashed out from it and left thunder in their wake.

A spaceship! Richie screamed, falling to his knees and covering his eyes. Oh my God it's a spaceship! But he believed-and would tell the others later, as best he could-that it was not a spaceship, although it might have come through space to get here. Whatever came down on that long-ago day had come from a place much farther away than another star or another galaxy, and if spaceship was the first word to come into his mind, perhaps that was only because his mind had no other way of grasping what his eyes were seeing.

There was an explosion then-a roar of sound followed by a rolling concussion that knocked them both down. This time it was Mike who groped for Richie's hand. There was another explosion. Richie opened his eyes and saw a glare of fire and a pillar of smoke rising into the sky.

It! he screamed at Mike, in an ecstasy of terror now-never in his life, before or after, would he feel any emotion so deeply, be so overwhelmed by feeling. It! It! It!

Mike dragged him to his feet and they ran along the high bank of the young Kenduskeag, never noticing how close they were to the drop. Once Mike stumbled and went skidding to his knees. Then it was Richie's turn to go down, barking his shin and tearing his pants. The wind had come up and it was pushing the smell of the burning forest toward them. The smoke grew thicker, and Richie became dimly aware that he and Mike were not running alone. The animals were on the move again, fleeing from the smoke, the fire, the death in the fire. Running from It, perhaps. The new arrival in their world.

Richie began to cough. He could hear Mike beside him, also coughing. The smoke was thicker, washing out the greens and grays and reds of the day. Mike fell again and Richie lost his hand. He groped for it and could not find it.

Mike! He screamed, panicked, coughing. Mike, where are you? Mike! MIKE!

But Mike was gone; Mike was nowhere.

richie! richie! richie!

(!!WHACKO!!)

"richie! richie! richie, are you

6

all right?"

His eyes fluttered open and he saw Beverly kneeling beside him, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief. The others-Bill, Eddie, Stan, and Ben-stood behind her, their faces solemn and scared. The side of Richie's face hurt like hell. He tried to speak to Beverly and could only croak. He tried to clear his throat and almost vomited. His throat and lungs felt as if they had somehow been lined with smoke.

At last he managed, "did you slap me, Beverly?"

"It was all I could think of to do," she said.

"Whacko," Richie muttered.

"I didn't think you were going to be all right, is all," Bev said, and suddenly burst into tears.

Richie patted her clumsily on the shoulder and Bill put a hand on the back of her neck. She reached around at once, took it, squeezed it.

Richie managed to sit up. The world began to swim in waves. When it steadied down he saw Mike leaning against a tree nearby, his face dazed and ashy-pale.

"Did I puke?" Richie asked Bev.

She nodded, still crying.

In a croaking, stumbling Irish Cop's Voice, he asked, "Get any on ye, darlin?"

Bev laughed through her tears and shook her head. "I turned you on your side. I was afraid... a-a-afraid you'd ch-ch-choke on it." She began to cry hard again.

"Nuh-Nuh-No f-fair," Bill said, still holding her hand. "I-I-I'm the one who stuh-huh-hutters a-around h-here."

"Not bad, Big Bill," Richie said. He tried to get to his feet and sat down again heavily. The world was still swimming. He began to cough and turned his head away, aware that he was going to retch again only a moment before it happened. He threw up a mess of green foam and thick saliva that mostly came out in ropes. He closed his eyes tight and croaked, "Anyone want a snack?"

"Oh shit!" Ben cried, disgusted and laughing at the same time.

"Looks more like puke to me," Richie said, although, in truth, his eyes were still tightly shut. "The shit usually comes out the other end, at least for me. I dunno about you, Haystack." When he opened his eyes at last, he saw the clubhouse about twenty yards away. Both the window and the big trapdoor were thrown open. Smoke, thinning now, puffed from both.

This time Richie was able to get to his feet. For a moment he was quite sure he was going to retch again, or faint, or both. "Whacko," he murmured, watching the world waver and warp in front of his eyes. When the feeling passed, he made his way over to where Mike was. Mike's eyes were still weasel-red, and from the dampness on his pants cuffs, Richie thought that maybe ole Mikey had taken a ride on the stomach-elevator, too.

"For a white boy you did pretty good," Mike croaked, and punched Richie weakly on the shoulder.

Richie was at a loss for words-a condition of exquisite rarity.

Bill came over. The others came with him.

"You pulled us out?" Richie asked.

"M-Me and Buh-Ben. Y-You were scuh-scuh-rheaming. B-Both of y-y-you. B-B-But-" He looked over at Ben.

Ben said, "It must have been the smoke, Bill." But there was no conviction in the big boy's voice at all.

Flatly, Richie said: "You mean what I think you mean?"

Bill shrugged. "W-W-What's th-that, Rih-Richie?"

Mike answered. "We weren't there at first, were we? You went down because you heard us screaming, but at first we weren't there."

"It was really smoky," Ben said. "Hearing you both screaming that way, that was scary enough. But the screaming... it sounded... well..."

"It s-s-sounded very f-f-f-far a-away," Bill said. Stuttering badly, he told them that when he and Ben had gone down, they hadn't been able to see either Richie or Mike. They had gone plunging around in the smoky clubhouse, panicked, scared that if they didn't act quickly the two boys might die of smoke poisoning. At last Bill had gripped a hand-Richie's. He had given "a huh-huh-hell of a yuh-yank" and Richie had come flying out of the gloom, only about one-quarter conscious. When Bill turned around he had seen Ben with Mike in a bear-hug, both of them coughing. Ben had thrown Mike up and out through the trapdoor.

Ben listened to all this, nodding.

"I kept grabbing, you know? Really not doing anything except jabbing my hand out like I wanted to shake hands. You grabbed it, Mike. Damn good thing you grabbed it when you did. I think you were just about gone."

"You guys make the clubhouse sound a lot bigger than it is," Richie said. "Talking about stumbling around in it and all. It's only five feet on every side."

There was a moment's silence while they all looked at Bill, who stood in frowning concentration.

"It w-w-was b-bigger," he said at last. "W-W-Wasn't it, Ben?"

Ben shrugged. "It sure seemed like it. Unless it was the smoke."

"It wasn't the smoke," Richie said. "Just before it happened-before we went out-I remember thinking it was at least as big as a ballroom in a movie. Like one of those musicals. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, something like that. I could barely see Mike against the other wall."...

"Before you went out?" Beverly asked.

"Well... what I mean... like..."

She grabbed Richie's arm. "It happened, didn't it? It really happened! You had a vision, just like in Ben's book!" Her face was glowing. "It really happened?

Richie looked down at himself, and then at Mike. One of the knees of Mike's corduroy pants was out, and both the knees of his own jeans were torn. He could look through the holes and see bleeding scrapes on both his knees.

"If it was a vision, I never want to have another one," he said. "I don't know about de Kingfish over there, but when I went down there, I didn't have any holes in my pants. They're practically new, for gosh sakes. My mom's gonna give me hell."

"What happened?" Ben and Eddie asked together.

Richie and Mike exchanged a glance and then Richie said, "Bevvie, you got a smoke?"

She had two, wrapped in a piece of tissue. Richie put one of them in his mouth and when she lit it the first drag made him cough so badly that he handed it back to her. "Can't," he said. "sorry."

"It was the past," Mike said.

"Shit on that," Richie said. "It wasn't just the past. It was ago."

"Yeah, right. We were in the Barrens, but the Kenduskeag was going a mile a minute. It was deep. It was fuckin wild. Sorry, Bevvie, but it was. And there were fish in it. Salmon, I think."

"M-My d-d-dad s-says th-there haven't been a-a-any fuh-fish in the K-Kendusk-k-keag for a l-l-long tuh-hime. B-Because of the suh-sewage."

"This was a long time, all right," Richie said. He looked around at them uncertainly. "I think it was a million years ago, at least."

A thunderstruck silence greeted this. Beverly broke it at last. "But what happened?"

Richie felt the words in his throat, but he had to struggle to bring them out. It felt almost like vomiting again. "We saw It come," he said at last. "I think that was it."

"Christ," Stan muttered. "Oh Christ."

There was a sharp hiss-gasp as Eddie used his aspirator.

"It came out of the sky," Mike said. "I never want to see anything like that again in my whole life. It was burning so hot you couldn't really look at it. And it was thowin off electricity and makin thunder. The noise... " He shook his head and looked at Richie. "It sounded like the end of the world. And when it hit, it started a forest fire. That was at the end of it."

"Was it a spaceship?" Ben asked.

"Yes," Richie said. "No," Mike said.

They looked at each other.

"Well, I guess it was," Mike said, and at the same time Richie said: "No, it really wasn't a spaceship, you know, but-"

They paused again while the others looked at them, perplexed.

"You tell," Richie said to Mike. "We mean the same thing, I think, but they're not getting it."