It

she said. ‘I’ll mess it up. Here. You.’ She held the Bullseye out, but Bill shook his head.
‘You h-h-have to, B-Beverly.’
There was a mewling from another cupboard.
Richie walked toward it.
‘Don’t get too close!’ Stan barked. ‘It might — ‘
Richie looked inside and an expression of sick disgust crossed his face. He slammed the cupboard shut with a bang that produced a dead echo in the empty house.
‘A litter.’ Richie sounded ill. ‘Biggest litter I ever saw . . . anyone ever saw, probably.’ He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. There’s hundreds of them in there.’ He looked
at them, his mouth twitching a little on one side. ‘Their tails . . . they were all ta ngled up, Bill. Knotted together.’ He grimaced. ‘Like snakes.’
They looked at the cupboard door. The mewling was muffled but still audible. Rats, Ben thought, looking at Bill’s white face and, over Bill’s shoulder, Mike’s ashy-gray one. Everyone’s ascared of rats. It knows it, too.
‘C-C-Come on,’ Bill said. ‘H-Here on Nuh-Nuh-Neibolt Street, the f-f-fun just neh-hever stops.’
They went down the front hall. Here the unlovely smells of rotting plaster and old urine were intermixed. They were able to look out at the street through dirty panes of glass and see their bikes. Bev’s and Ben’s were heeled over on their kickstands. Bill’s leaned against a stunted maple tree. To Ben the bikes looked a thousand miles away, like things seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The deserted street with its casual patchings of asphalt, the faded humid sky, the steady ding-ding-ding of a locomotive running on a siding . . . these things seemed like dreams to him, hallucinations. What was real was this squalid hallway with its stinks and shadows.
There was a shatter of broken brown glass in one corner — Rheingold bottles.
In the other corner, wet and swelled, was a digest-sized girlybook. The woman on the cover was bent over a chair, her skirt up in the back to show the tops of her fishnet hose and her black panties. The picture did not look particularly sexy to Ben, nor did it embarrass him that Beverly had also glanced at it. Moisture had yellowed the woman’s skin and moisture had humped the cover in ripples that became wrinkles on her face. Her salacious wink had become the leer of a dead whore.
(Years later, as Ben recounted this, Bev suddenly cried out, startling all of them — they were not so much listening to the story as reliving it. ‘It was her!’ Bev yelled. ‘Mrs Kersh! It was her!’)
As Ben looked, the young/old crone on the girlybook cover winked at him. She wiggled her fanny in an obscene come-on.
Cold all over, yet sweating, Ben looked away.
Bill pushed open a door on the left and they followed him into a vaultlike room that might once have been a parlor. A crumpled pair of green pants was hung over the light-fixture which depended from the ceiling. Like the cellar, this room seemed much too big to Ben, almost as long as a freight-car. Much too long for a house as small as this one had appeared from the outside —
Oh, but that was outside, a new voice spoke inside his mind. It was a jocular, squealing voice, and Ben realized with sudden numbing certainty that he was hearing Pennywise Itself; Pennywise was speaking to him on some crazy mental radio. Outside, things always looksmaller than they really are, don’t they, Ben?
‘Go away,’ he whispered.
Richie turned to look at him, his face still strained and pale. ‘You say something?’
Ben shook his head. The voice was gone. That was an important thing, a good thing. Yet
(outside)
he had understood. This house was a special place, a kind of station, one of the places in Derry, one of the many, perhaps, from which It wa s able to find its way into the overworld. This stinking rotted house where everything was somehow wrong. It wasn’t just that it seemed too big; the angles were wrong, the perspective crazy. Ben was standing just inside the door between the parlor and the hallway and the others were moving away from him across a space that now looked almost as big as Bassey Park . . . but as they moved away, they seemed to grow larger instead of smaller. The floor seemed to slope, and —
Mike turned. ‘Ben!’ he called, and Ben saw alarm on his face. ‘Catch up! We’re losing you!’ He could barely hear the last word. It trailed away as if the others were being swept off on a fast train.
Suddenly terrified, he began