Something else was troubling him, but the concept was too large and too vague for his tired boy's mind to grasp. Perhaps it was the very simplicity of the idea that made it elusive: they were falling away from each other. The bond that had held them all this long summer was dissolving. It had been faced and vanquished. It might be dead, as Richie and Eddie thought, or It might be wounded so badly It would sleep for a hundred years, or a thousand, or ten thousand. They had faced It, seen It with Its final mask laid aside, and It had been horrible enough-oh, for sure!-but once seen, Its physical form was not so bad and Its most potent weapon was taken away from It. They all had, after all, seen spiders before. They were alien and somehow crawlingly dreadful, and he supposed that none of them would ever be able to see another one

(if we ever get out of this)

without feeling a shudder of revulsion. But a spider was, after all, only a spider. Perhaps at the end, when the masks of horror were laid aside, there was nothing with which the human mind could not cope. That was a heartening thought. Anything except

(the deadlights)

whatever had been out there, but perhaps even that unspeakable living light which crouched at the doorway to the macroverse was dead or dying. The deadlights, and the trip into the black to the place where they had been, was already growing hazy and hard to recall in his mind. And that wasn't really the point. The point, felt but not grasped, was simply that the fellowship was ending... it was ending and they were still in the dark. That Other had through their friendship, perhaps been able to make them something more than children. But they were becoming children again. Bill felt it as much as the others.

"What now, Bill?" Richie asked, finally saying it right out.

"I d-d-don't nuh-nuh-know," Bill said. His stutter was back, alive and well. He heard it, they heard it, and he stood in the dark, smelling the sodden aroma of their growing panic, wondering how long it would be before somebody-Stan, most likely it would be Stan-tore things wide open by saying: Well, why don't you know? You got us into this!

"And what about Henry?" Mike asked uneasily. "Is he still out there, or what?"

"Oh, Jeez," Eddie said... almost moaned. "I forgot about him. Sure he is, sure he is, he's probably as lost as we are and we could run into him any time... Jeez, Bill, don't you have any ideas? Your dad works down here! Don't you have any ideas at all?"

Bill listened to the distant mocking thunder of the water and tried to have the idea that Eddie-all of them-had a right to demand. Because yes, correct, he had gotten them into this and it was his responsibility to get them back out again. Nothing came. Nothing.

"I have an idea," Beverly said quietly.

In the dark, Bill heard a sound he could not immediately place. A whispery little sound, but not scary. Then there was a more easily placed sound... a zipper. What-? he thought, and then he realized what. She was undressing. For some reason, Beverly was undressing.

"What are you doing? Richie asked, and his shocked voice cracked on the last word.

"I know something," Beverly said in the dark, and to Bill her voice sounded older. "I know because my father told me. I know how to bring us back together. And if we're not together we'll never get out."

"What?" Ben asked, sounding bewildered and terrified. "What are you talking about?"

"Something that will bring us together forever. Something that will show-"

"Nuh-Nuh-No, B-B-Beverly!" Bill said, suddenly understanding, understanding everything.

"-that will show that I love you all," Beverly said, "that you're all my friends."

"What's she t-" Mike began.

Calmly, Beverly cut across his words. "Who's first?" she asked. "I think

8

IN THE LAIR OF IT / 1985

he's dying," Beverly wept. "His arm, It ate his arm-She reached for Bill, clung to him, and Bill shook her off.

"It's getting away again!" he roared at her. Blood caked his lips and chin. "Cuh-Cuh-Come on! Richie! B-B-Ben! This tuh-time we're g-g-going to fuh-hinish her!"

Richie turned Bill toward him, looked at him as you would look at a man who is hopelessly raving. "Bill, we have to take care of Eddie. We have to get a tourniquet on him, get him out of here."

But Beverly was now sitting with Eddie's head in her lap, cradling him. She had closed his eyes. "Go with Bill," she said. "If you let him die for nothing. if It comes back in another twenty-five years, or fifty, or even two thousand, I swear I'll... I'll haunt your ghosts. Go!"

Richie looked at her for a moment, indecisive. Then he became aware that her face was losing definition, becoming not a face but a pale shape in the growing shadows. The light was fading. It decided him. "All right," he said to Bill. "This time we chase."

Ben was standing in back of the spiderweb, which had begun to decay again. He had also seen the shape swaying high up in it, and he prayed that Bill would not look up.

But as the web began to fall in drifts and strands and skeins, Bill did.

He saw Audra, sagging as if in a very old and creaky elevator. She dropped ten feet, stopped, swaying from side to side, and then abruptly dropped another fifteen. Her face never changed. Her eyes, china-blue, were wide open. Her bare feet swung back and forth like pendulums. Her hair hung lankly over her shoulders. Her mouth was ajar.

"AUDRA!" he screamed.

"Bill, come on!" Ben shouted.

The web was falling all around them now, thudding to the floor and beginning to run. Richie suddenly grabbed Bill around the waist, and propelled him forward, shooting for a ten-foot-high gap between the floor and the bottommost cross-strand of the sagging web. "Go, Bill! Go! Go!"

"That's Audra!" Bill shouted desperately. "Thuh-That's AUDRA!"

"I don't give a shit if it's the Pope," Richie said grimly. "Eddie's dead and we're going to kill It, if It's still alive. We're going to finish the job this time, Big Bill. Either she's alive or she's not. Now come on!"

Bill hung back a moment longer, and then snapshots of the children, all the dead children, seemed to flutter through his mind like lost photographs from George's album. SCHOOL FRIENDS.

"A-All ruh-right. Let's g-go. Guh-Guh-God forgive m-me."

He and Richie ran under the strand of cross-webbing seconds before it collapsed, and joined Ben on the other side. They ran after It as Audra swung and dangled fifty feet above the stone floor, wrapped in a numbing cocoon that was attached to the decaying web.

9

BEN

They followed the trail of Its black blood-oily pools of ichor that ran and dripped into the cracks between the flagstones. But as the floor began to rise toward a semicircular black opening at the far side of the chamber, Ben saw something new: a trail of eggs. Each was black and rough-shelled, perhaps as big as an ostrich-egg. A waxy light shone from within them. Ben realized they were semi-transparent; he could see black shapes moving inside.

Its children, he thought, and felt his gorge rise. Its miscarried children. God! God!

Richie and Bill had stopped and were staring at the eggs with stupid, dazed wonder.

"Go on! Go on!" Ben shouted. "I'll take care of them! Get It!"

"Here!" Richie shouted, and threw Ben a pack of Derry Town House matches.

Ben caught them. Bill and Richie ran on. Ben watched them in the rapidly dimming light for a moment. They ran into the darkness of Its escape-passage and were lost from sight. Then he looked down at the first of the thin-shelled eggs, at the black, mantalike shadow inside, and felt his determination waver. This... hey guys, this was too much. This was simply too awful. And surely they would die without his help; they had not been so much laid as dropped.

But It's time was close... and if one of them is capable of surviving... even one...

Summoning all of his courage, summoning up Eddie's pale, dying face, Ben brought one Desert Driver boot down on the first egg. It broke with a sodden squelch as some stinking placenta ran out around his boot. Then a spider the size of a rat was scrabbling weakly across the floor, trying to get away, and Ben could hear it in his head, its high mewling cries like the sound of a handsaw being bent rapidly back and forth so that it makes ghost-music.

Ben lurched after it on legs that felt like stilts and brought his foot down again. He felt the spider's body crunch and splatter under the heel of his boot. His gorge clenched and this time there was no way he could hold back. He vomited, then twisted his heel, grinding the thing into the stones, listening to the cries in his head fade to nothing.

How many? How many eggs? Didn't I read somewhere that spiders can lay thousands... or millions? I can't keep doing this, I'll go mad -

You have to. You have to. Come on, Ben... get it together!

He went to the next egg and repeated the process in the last of the dying lieht Everything was repeated: the brittle snap, the squelch of liquid, the final coup de grace. The next. The next. The next. Making his way slowly toward the black arch into which his friends had gone. The darkness was complete now Beverly and the decaying web somewhere behind him. He could still hear the whisper of its collapse. The eggs were pallid stones in the dark. As he reached each one he struck a light from the matchbook and broke it open. In each case he was able to follow the course of the dazed spiderling and crush it before the light flickered out. He had no idea how he was going to proceed if his matches gave out before he had crushed the last of the eggs and killed each one's unspeakable cargo.

10

IT / 1985

Still coming.

It sensed them still coming, gaining, and Its fear grew. Perhaps It was not eternal after all-the unthinkable must finally be thought. Worse, It sensed the death of Its young. A third of these hated hateful men-boys was walking steadily up Its trail of birth, almost insane with revulsion but continuing nonetheless, methodically stamping the life from each of Its eggs.

No! It wailed, lurching from side to side, feeling Its life-force running from a hundred wounds, none of them mortal in itself, but each a song of pain, each slowing It. One of Its legs hung by a single living twist of meat. One of Its eyes was blind. It sensed a terrible rupture inside, the result of whatever poison one of the hated men-boys had managed to shoot down Its throat.

And still they came on, closing the distance, and how could this happen? It whined and mewled, and when It sensed them almost directly behind, It did the only thing It could do now: It turned to fight.

11

BEVERLY

Before the last of the light faded and utter dark closed down, she saw Bill's wife plunge another twenty feet and then fetch up again. She had begun to spin, her long red hair fanning out. His wife, she thought. But I was his first love, and if he thought some other woman was his first, it was only because he forgot... forgot Derry.

Then she was in darkness, alone with the sound of the falling web and Eddie's simple moveless weight. She didn't want to let him go, didn't want to let his face lie on the foul floor of this place. So she held his head in the crook of an arm that had gone mostly numb and brushed his hair away from his damp forehead. She thought of the birds... that was something she supposed she had gotten from Stan. Poor Stan, who hadn't been able to face this.

All of them... I was their first love.

She tried to remember it-it was something good to think about in all this darkness, where you couldn't place the sounds. It made her feel less alone. At first it wouldn't come; the image of the birds intervened-crows and grackles and starlings, spring birds that came back from somewhere while the streets were still running with meltwater and the last patches of crusted dirty snow clung grimly to their shady places.

It seemed to her that it was always on a cloudy day that you first heard and saw those spring birds and wondered where they came from. Suddenly they were just back in Derry, filling the white air with their raucous chatter. They lined the telephone wires and roofpeaks of the Victorian houses on West Broadway; they jostled for places on the aluminum branches of the elaborate TV antenna on top of Wally's Spa; they loaded the wet black branches of the elms on Lower Main Street. They settled, they talked to each other in the screamy babbling voices of old countrywomen at the weekly Grange Bingo games, and then, at some signal which humans could not discern, they all took wing at once, turning the sky black with their numbers... and came down somewhere else.

Yes, the birds, I was thinking of them because I was ashamed. It was my father who made me ashamed, I guess, and maybe that was It's doing, too. Maybe.

The memory came-the memory behind the birds-but it was vague and disconnected. Perhaps this one always would be. She had-

Her thoughts broke off as she realized that Eddie

12

LOVE AND DESIRE / AUGUST 10TH, 1958

comes to her first, because he is the most frightened. He comes to her not as her friend of that summer, or as her brief lover now, but the way he would have come to his mother only three or four years ago, to be comforted; he doesn't draw back from her smooth nakedness and at first she doubts if he even feels it. He is trembling, and although she holds him the darkness is so perfect that even this close she cannot see him; except for the rough cast he might as well be a phantom.

"What do you want?" he asks her.

"You have to put your thing in me," she says.

He tries to pull back but she holds him and he subsides against her. She has heard someone-Ben, she thinks-draw in his breath.

"Bevvie, I can't do that. I don't know how-"

"I think it's easy. But you'll have to get undressed." She thinks about the intricacies of managing cast and shirt, first somehow separating and then rejoining them, and amends, "Your pants, anyway."

"No, I can't!" But she thinks part of him can, and wants to, because his trembling has stopped and she feels something small and hard which presses against the right side of her belly.

"You can," she says, and pulls him down. The surface beneath her bare back and legs is firm, clayey, dry. The distant thunder of the water is drowsy, soothing. She reaches for him. There's a moment when her father's face intervenes, harsh and forbidding

(I want to see if you're intact)

and then she closes her arms around Eddie's neck, her smooth cheek against his smooth cheek, and as he tentatively touches her small breasts she sighs and thinks for the first time This is Eddie and she remembers a day in July-could it only have been last month?-when no one else turned up in the Barrens but Eddie, and he had a whole bunch of Little Lulu comic books and they read together for most of the afternoon, Little Lulu looking for beebleberries and getting in all sorts of crazy situations, Witch Hazel, all of those guys. It had been fun.