It

somewhere up ahead. They needed to pay. They needed
(a whuppin)
to be punished.
Whatever purgatory this was, it was a smelly one. Water dripped and echoed. His shoes and pants were soaked. The little shitpots were somewhere up ahead in this maze of tunnels, and perhaps they thought
(Henry)
Tom and his friends would get lost, but the joke was on them
(ha-ha all over you! )
because he had another friend, oh yes, a special friend, and this friend had marked the path they were to take with . . . with . . .
(Moon-Balloons)
thingamajigs that were big and round and somehow lighted from within so that they shed a glow like that which falls mysteriously from oldfashioned streetlamps. One of these balloons floated and drifted at each intersection, and on the side of each was an arrow, pointing the way into the tunnel-branch he and
(Belch and Victor)
his unseen friends were to take. And it was the right path, oh yes: he could hear the others ahead, their splashing progress echoing back, the distorted murmurs of their voices. They were getting closer, catching up. And when they did . . . Tom looked down and saw that he still had the switchknife in his hand.
For a moment he was frightened — this was like one of those crazy astral experiences he sometimes read about in the weekly tabloids, when your spirit left your body and entered someone else’s. The shape of his body felt different to him, as if he were not Tom but
(Henry)
someone else, someone younger. He began to fight his way out of the dream, panicked, and then a voice was talking to him, a soothing voice, whispering in his ear: It doesn’t matter when this is, and it doesn’t matter who you are. What matters is that Beverly is up there, she’s with them, my good friend, and do you know what? She’s been doing something one hell of a lot worse than sneaking smokes. You know what? She’s been fucking her old friend Bill Denbrough! Yes indeed! She and that stuttering freak, going right at it! They —
That’s a lie! he tried to scream. She wouldn’t dare!
But he knew it was no lie. She had used a belt on his
(kicked me in the)
balls and run off and she now had cheated on him, the slutty
(child)
little roundheels bitch had actually cheated on him, and oh dear friends, oh good neighbors, she was going to get the whuppin of all whuppins — first her and then Denbrough, her novel-writing friend. And anyone who tried to get in his way, you could count them in for a piece of the action, too.
He stepped up his pace, although the breath was already whistling in and out of his throat. Up ahead he could see another luminous circle bobbing in the darkness — another Moon-Balloon. He could hear the voices of the people ahead of him, and the fact that they were childish voices no longer bothered him. It was as the voice said: it didn’t matter where, when or who. Beverly was up there, and oh dear friends, oh good neighbors —
‘Come on, you guys, move your asses,’ he said, and it didn’t even matter that his voice wasn’t his own but the voice of a boy.
Then, as they approached the Moon-Balloon, he looked around and saw his companions for the first time. Both of them were dead. One was headless. The face of the other had been split open, as if by a great talon.
‘We’re moving as fast as we can, Henry,’ the boy with the split face said, and his lips moved in two pieces, grotesquely out of sync with each other, and that was when Tom shrieked the dream to pieces and came back to himself, tottering on the brink of what felt like some great empty space.
He struggled to keep his balance, lost it, and tumbled to the floor. The floor was carpeted but the fall still sent a sickening burst of pain through his hurt knee and he Stifled another cry against his forearm.
Where am I? Where the fuck am I?
He became aware of a faint but clear white light, and for a frightening moment he thought he was back in the dream again, that it was light cast by one of those crazy balloons. Then