It (119 page)

“I didn't,”
Beverly said again, to no one in particular.

“So what do we do now?” Richie asked.

“We a-a-all go down,” Bill said. “Because that's w-what w-w-we're
suh-supposed
to do.”

“And if we all pass out?” Eddie asked.

Bill looked at Beverly again. “I-If B-Bev's t-telling the truh-truth, and s-she i-i-is, w-we won't.”

“How do you
know?”
Stan asked.

“I-I j-just d-d-do.”

The bird sang again.

Ben and Richie went down first and the others handed the rocks down one by one. Richie passed them on to Ben, who made a small stone circle in the middle of the dirt clubhouse floor. “Okay,” he said. “That's enough.”

The others came down, each with a handful of the green twigs they'd cut with Ben's hatchet. Bill came last. He closed the trapdoor and opened the narrow hinged window. “Th-Th-There,” he said. “Th-there's our smuh-smoke-hole. Do we h-have any kih-kih-kindling?”

“You can use this, if you want,” Mike said, and took a battered Archie funnybook out of his hip pocket. “I read it already.”

Bill tore the pages out of the funnybook one by one, working slowly and gravely. The others sat around the walls, knee to knee and shoulder to shoulder, watching, not speaking. The tension was thick and still.

Bill laid small twigs and branches over the paper and then looked at Beverly. “Y-Y-You g-got the muh-matches,” he said.

She lit one, a tiny yellow flare in the gloom. “Darn thing probably won't catch anyway,” she said in a slightly uneven voice, and touched a light to the paper in several places. When the matchflame got close to her fingers, she tossed it into the center.

The flames blazed up yellow, crackling, throwing their faces into sharp relief, and in that moment Richie had no trouble believing Ben's Indian story, and he thought it must have been like this back in those old days when the idea of white men was still no more than a rumor or a tall tale to those Indians who followed buffalo herds so big they could cover the earth from horizon to horizon, herds so big that their passing shook the ground like an earthquake. In that moment Richie could picture those Indians, Kiowas or Pawnees or whatever
they were, down in their smoke-hole, knee to knee and shoulder to shoulder, watching as the flames guttered and sank into the green wood like hot sores, listening to the faint and steady
sssssss
of sap oozing out of the damp wood, waiting for the vision to descend.

Yeah. Sitting here now he could believe it all . . . and looking at their somber faces as they studied the flames and the charring pages of Mike's Archie funnybook, he could see that they believed it, too.

The branches were catching. The clubhouse began to fill up with smoke. Some of it, white as cotton smoke-signals in a Saturday-matinee movie starring Randolph Scott or Audie Murphy, escaped from the smoke-hole. But with no moving air outside to create a draft, most of it stayed below. It had an acrid bite that made eyes sting and throats throb. Richie heard Eddie cough twice—a flat sound like dry boards being whacked together—and then fall silent again.
He shouldn't be down here,
he thought . . . but something else apparently felt otherwise.

Bill tossed another handful of green twigs on the smoldering fire and asked in a thin voice that was not much like his usual speaking voice: “Anyone having a-any vih-vih-visions?”

“Visions of getting out of here,” Stan Uris said. Beverly laughed at this, but her laughter turned into a fit of coughing and choking.

Richie leaned his head back against the wall and looked up at the smoke-hole—a thin rectangle of mellow white light. He thought about the Paul Bunyan statue that day in March . . . but that had only been a mirage, a hallucination, a

(vision)

“Smoke's
killin
me,” Ben said. “Whoo!”

“So leave,” Richie murmured, not taking his eyes off the smoke-hole. He felt as if he was getting a handle on this. He felt as if he had lost ten pounds. And he sure as shit felt as if the clubhouse had gotten bigger. Damn straight on that last. He had been sitting with Ben Hanscom's fat right leg squashed against his left one and Bill Denbrough's bony left shoulder socked into his right arm. Now he was touching neither of them. He glanced lazily to his right and left to verify that his perception was true, and it was. Ben was a foot or so to his left. On his right, Bill was even father away.

“Place is bigger, friends and neighbors,” he said. He took a deeper breath and coughed hard. It hurt, hurt deep in his chest, the way a
cough hurt when you had the flu or the grippe or something. For awhile he thought it would never pass; that he would just go on coughing until they had to pull him out.
If they still can,
he thought, but the thought was really too dim to be frightening.

Then Bill was pounding him on the back, and the coughing fit passed.

“You don't know you don't always,” Richie said. He was looking at the smoke-hole again instead of at Bill. How bright it seemed! When he closed his eyes he could still see the rectangle, floating there in the dark, but bright green instead of bright white.

“Whuh-whuh-what do you m-mean?” Bill asked.

“Stutter.” He paused, aware that someone else was coughing but not sure who it was.
“You
ought to do the Voices, not me, Big Bill. You—”

The coughing got louder. Suddenly the clubhouse was flooded with daylight, so sudden and so bright Richie had to squint against it. He could just make out Stan Uris, climbing and clawing his way out.

“Sorry,” Stan managed, through his spasmodic coughing. “Sorry, can't—”

“It's all right,” Richie heard himself say. “You doan need no stinkin' batches.” His voice sounded as if it were coming from a different body.

The trapdoor slammed shut a moment later, but enough fresh air had come in to clear his head a little. Before Ben moved over a little to fill the space Stan had vacated, Richie became aware of Ben's leg again, pressing his. How had he gotten the idea that the clubhouse had gotten bigger?

Mike Hanlon threw more sticks on the smoky fire. Richie resumed taking shallow breaths and looking up at the smoke-hole. He had no sense of real time passing, but he was vaguely aware that, in addition to the smoke, the clubhouse was getting good and hot.

He looked around, looked at his friends. They were hard to see, half-swallowed in shadowsmoke and still white summerlight. Bev's head was tilted back against a piece of shoring, her hands on her knees, her eyes closed, tears trickling down her cheeks toward her earlobes. Bill was sitting cross-legged, his chin on his chest. Ben was—

But suddenly Ben was getting to his feet, pushing the trapdoor open again.

“There goes Ben,” Mike said. He was sitting Indian-fashion directly across from Richie, his eyes as red as a weasel's.

Comparative coolness struck them again. The air freshened as smoke swirled up through the trap. Ben was coughing and dry-retching. He pulled himself out with Stan's help, and before either of them could close the trapdoor, Eddie was staggering to his feet, his face a deadly pale except for the bruised-looking patches under his eyes and traced just below his cheekbones. His thin chest was hitching up and down in quick, shallow spasms. He groped weakly for the edge of the escape hatch and would have fallen if Ben had not grabbed one hand and Stan the other.

“Sorry,” Eddie managed in a squeaky little whisper, and then they hauled him up. The trapdoor banged down again.

There was a long, quiet period. The smoke built up until it was a thick still fog in the clubhouse.
Looks like a pea-souper to me, Watson,
Richie thought, and for a moment he imagined himself as Sherlock Holmes (a Holmes who looked a great deal like Basil Rathbone and who was totally black and white), moving purposefully along Baker Street; Moriarty was somewhere near, a hansom cab awaited, and the game was afoot.

The thought was amazingly clear, amazingly
solid.
It seemed almost to have weight, as if it were not a little pocket-daydream of the sort he had all the time (batting cleanup for the Bosox, bottom of the ninth, bases loaded,
and there it goes, it's up . . . IT'S GONE! Home run, Tozier . . . and that breaks the Babe's record!),
but something that was almost
real.

There was still enough of the wiseacre in him to think that if all he was getting out of this was a vision of Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, then the whole idea of visions was pretty overrated.

Except of course it isn't Moriarty that's out there.
It's
out there—some It—and It's real. It—

Then the trapdoor opened again and Beverly was struggling her way out, coughing dryly, one hand cupped over her mouth. Ben got one hand and Stan grabbed her under the other arm. Half-pulled, half-scrambling under her own power, she was up and gone.

“Ih-Ih-It
i-is
bi-higger,” Bill said.

Richie looked around. He saw the circle of stones with the fire smoldering within, fuming out clouds of smoke. Across the way he saw Mike sitting cross-legged like a totem carved from mahogany, staring at him though the fire with his smoke-reddened eyes. Except Mike was better than twenty yards away, and Bill was even farther away, on Richie's right. The underground clubhouse was now at least the size of a ballroom.

“Doesn't matter,” Mike said. “It's gonna come pretty quick.
Somethin
is.”

“Y-Y-Yeah,” Bill said. “But I . . . I . . . I—”

He began to cough. He tried to control it, but the cough worsened, a dry rattling. Dimly Richie saw Bill stumble to his feet, lunge for the trapdoor, and shove it open.

“Guh-Guh-Good luh-luh-luh—”

And then he was gone, dragged up by the others.

“Looks like it's you and me, ole Mikey,” Richie said, and then he began to cough himself. “I thought for sure that it would be Bill—”

The cough worsened. He doubled over, hacking dryly, unable to get his breath. His head was thudding—whacking—like a turnip filled with blood. His eyes teared behind his glasses.

From far away, he heard Mike saying: “Go on up if you have to, Richie. Don't go flippy. Don't kill yourself.”

He raised a hand toward Mike and flapped it at him

(no stinkin batches)

in a negative gesture. Little by little he began to get the coughing under control again. Mike was right; something was going to happen, and soon. He wanted to still be here when it did.

He tilted his head back and looked up at the smoke-hole again. The coughing fit had left him feeling light-headed, and now he seemed to be floating on a cushion of air. It was a pleasant feeling. He took shallow breaths and thought:
Someday I'm going to be a rock-and-roll star. That's it, yes. I'll be famous. I'll make records and albums and movies. I'll have a black sportcoat and white shoes and a yellow Cadillac. And when I come back to Derry, they'll all eat their hearts out, even Bowers. I wear glasses, but what the fuck? Buddy Holly wears glasses. I'll bop till I'm blue and dance till I'm black. I'll be the first rock-and-roll star to ever come from Maine. I'll—

The thought drifted away. It didn't matter. He found that now he didn't need to take shallow breaths. His lungs had adapted. He could breathe as much smoke as he wanted. Maybe he was from Venus.

Mike threw more sticks on the fire. Not to be outdone, Richie tossed on another handful himself.

“How you feeling, Rich?” Mike asked.

Richie smiled. “Better. Good, almost. You?”

Mike nodded and smiled back. “I feel okay. Have you been having some funny thoughts?”

“Yeah. Thought I was Sherlock Holmes for a minute there. Then I thought I could dance like the Dovells. Your eyes are so red you wouldn't believe it, you know it?”

“Yours too. Just a coupla weasels in the pen, that's what we are.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You wanna say all right?”

“All right. You wanna say you got the word?”

“I got it, Mikey.”

“Yeah, okay.”

They grinned at each other and then Richie let his head tilt back against the wall again and looked up at the smoke-hole. Shortly he began to drift away. No . . . not away.
Up.
He was drifting
up.
Like

(float down here we all)

a balloon.

“Yuh-yuh-you g-g-guys all ri-right?”

Bill's voice, coming down through the smoke-hole. Coming from Venus. Worried. Richie felt himself thud back down inside himself.

“All right,” he heard his voice, distant, irritated. “All right, we
said
all right, be quiet, Bill, let us get the word, we wanna say we got the

(world)

word.”

The clubhouse was bigger than ever, floored now in some polished wood. The smoke was fog-thick and it was hard to see the fire. That floor! Jesus-come-please-us! It was as big as a ballroom floor in an MGM musical extravaganza. Mike looked at him from the other side, a shape almost lost in the fog.

You coming, ole Mikey?

Right here with you, Richie.

You still want to say all right?

Yeah . . . but hold my hand . . . can you catch hold?

I think so.

Richie held his hand out, and although Mike was on the far side of this enormous room he felt those strong brown fingers close over his wrist. Oh and that was good, that was a good touch—good to find desire in comfort, to find comfort in desire, to find substance in smoke and smoke in substance—

He tilted his head back and looked at the smoke-hole, so white and wee. It was farther up now.
Miles
up. Venusian skylight.