It

stomach throbbed painfully, and he pulled up the remains of his sweatshirt for a look. He winced and drew a whistle of air in over his teeth. His belly looked like a grotesque Christmas-tree ball, all caked red blood and smeared green from his slide down the
embankment. He pulled the sweatshirt down again. Looking at that mess made him feel like blowing lunch.
Now he heard a low humming noise from ahead — it was one steady note just above the low range of his hearing. An adult, intent only on getting the hell out of there (the mosquitoes had found Ben now, and while nowhere near as big as sparrows, they were pretty big), would have ignored it, or simply not heard it at all. But Ben was a boy, and he was already getting over his fright. He swerved to his left and pushed through some low laurel bushes. Beyond them, sticking out of the ground, were the top three feet of a cement cylinder about four feet wide. It was capped with a vented iron manhole cover. The cover was stamped with the words DERRYSEWERDEFT . The sound — this close it was more a drone than a hum — was coming from someplace deep inside.
Ben put one eye to a venthole but could see nothing. He could hear that drone, and water running down there someplace, but that was all. He took a breath, got a whiff of a sour smell that was both dank and shitty, and drew back with a wince. It was a sewer, that was all. Or maybe a combined sewer and drainage-tunnel — there were plenty of those in flood-conscious Derry. No big deal. But it had given him a funny sort of chill. Part of it was seeing the handiwork of man in all this overgrown jumble of wilderness, but he supposed part of it was the shape of the thing itself — that concrete cylinder jutting out of the ground. Ben had read H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine the year before, first the Classics Comics version and then the whole book. This cylinder with its vented iron cap reminded him of the wells which lead down into the country of the slumped and horrible Morlocks.
He moved away from it quickly, trying to find west again. He got to a link clearing and turned until his shadow was as directly behind him as he could get it. Then he headed off in a straight line.
Five minutes later he heard more running water ahead, and voices. Kids’ voices.
He stopped to listen, and that was when he heard snapping branches and other voices behind him. They were perfectly recognizable. They belonged to Victor, Belch, and the one and only Henry Bowers.
The nightmare was not over yet, it seemed.
Ben looked around for a place to go to earth.
10
He came out of his hiding place about two hours later, dirtier than ever, but a little refreshed. Incredible as it seemed to him, he had dozed off.
When he had heard the three of them behind him, coming after him still, Ben had come dangerously close to freezing up completely, like an animal caught in the headlamps of an oncoming truck. A paralytic drowsiness began to steal over him. The idea of simply lying down, curling up into a ball like a hedgehog, and letting them do whatever they felt they had to occurred to him. It was a crazy idea, but it also seemed like a strangely good idea.
But instead Ben began to move toward the sound of the running water and those other kids. He tried to untangle their voices and get the sense of what they were saying — anything to shake off that scary paralysis of the spirit. Some project. They were talking about some project. One or two of the voices were even a little familiar. There was a splash, followed by a burst of good-natured laughter. The laughter filled Ben with a kind of stupid longing, and made him more aware of his dangerous position than anything else had done.
If he was going to be caught, there was no need to let these kids in for a dose of his medicine. Ben turned right again. Like many large people, he was remarkably light-footed. He passed close enough to the boys to see their shadows moving back and forth between him
and the bright water, bu t they neither saw him nor heard him. Gradually their voices began to fall behind.
He came to a narrow path which had been beaten down to the bare earth. Ben considered it for a moment, then shook his head a little. He crossed it and plunged into the undergrowth again. He moved more slowly now, pushing bushes aside rather than stampeding through them. He was still moving roughly parallel to the stream the other kids had been playing beside. Even through the intervening bushes and trees he could see it was much wider than the one into which he and Henry had fallen.
Here was another of those concrete cylinders, barely visible amid a snarl of blackberry creepers, humming quietly to itself. Beyond, an embankment dropped off to the stream, and