It

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 Ric hie. ‘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.’
Mike coughed into his fist and then looked up at the others, almost apologetically. ‘I don’t know just how to tell you,’ he said.
‘T-T-Try,’ Bill said urgently.
‘It came out of the sky,’ Mike repeated, ‘but it wasn’t a spaceship, exactly. It wasn’t a meteor, either. It was more like . . . well . . . like the Ark of the Covenant, in the Bible, that was supposed to have the Spirit of God inside of it . . . except this wasn’t God. Just feeling It, watching It come, you knew It meant bad, that It was bad.’
He looked at them.
Richie nodded. ‘It came from . . . outside. I got that feeling. From outside.’
‘Outside where, Richie?’ Eddie asked.
‘Outside everything,’ Richie said. ‘And when It came down . . . It made the biggest damn hole you ever saw in your life. It turned this big hill into a doughnut, just about. It landed right where the downtown part of Derry is now.’
He looked at them. ‘Do you get it?’
Beverly dropped the cigarette half-smoked and crushed it out under one shoe.
Mike said. ‘It’s always been here, since the beginning of time . . . since before there were m e n anywhere, unless maybe there were just a few of them in Africa somewhere, swinging through the trees or living in caves. The crater’s gone now, and ht e ice age probably scraped the valley deeper and changed some stuff around and filled the crater in . . . but It was here then, sleeping, maybe, waiting for the ice to melt, waiting for the people to come.’
That’s why It uses the sewers and the drains ,’ Richie put in. They must be regular freeways for It.’
‘You didn’t see what It looked like?’ Stan Uris asked abruptly and a little hoarsely.
They shook their heads.
‘Can we beat It?’ Eddie said in the silence. ‘A thing like that?’ No one answered.

1
By the time Richie finishes, they’re all nodding. Eddie is nodding along with them, remembering along with them, when the pain suddenly races up his left arm. Races up? No. Rips through: it feels as if someone is trying to sharpen a rusty saw on the bone in there. He grimaces and reaches into the pocket of his sport jacket, sorts through a number of bottles by feel, and takes out the Excedrin. He swallows two with a gulp of gin-and-prune juice. The arm has been paining him off and on all day. At first he dismissed it as the twinges of bursitis he sometimes gets when the weather is damp. But halfway through Richie’s story, a new memory clicks into place for him and he understands the pain.