It

they had left the place where Patrick Hockstetter’s body was, but Bill was sure he could never find his way back. He kept thinking about what his father had said: You could wander for weeks. If Eddie’s sense of direction failed them now, they wouldn’t need It to kill them; they would wander until they died . . . or, if they got into the wrong set of pipes, until they were drowned like rats in a rain-barrel.
But Eddie didn’t seem a bit worried. Every now and then he would ask Bill to light one of their diminishing store of matches, look around thoughtfully, and then set off again. He made rights and lefts seemingly at random. Sometimes the pipes were so big Bill could not reach their tops even by stretching his hand up all the way. Sometimes they had to crawl, and once, for five horrible minutes (which felt more like five hours), they wormed their way along on their bellies, Eddie now leading, the others following with their noses to the heels of the person ahead.
The only thing Bill was completely sure of was that they had somehow gotten into a disused section of the Derry sewer system. They had left all the active pipes either far behind or far above. The roar of running water had dimmed to a far-off thunder. These pipes were older, not kiln-fired ceramic but a crumbly claylike stuff that sometimes oozed springs of unpleasant-smelling fluid. The smells of human waste — those ripe gassy smells that had threatened to suffocate them all — had faded, but they had been replaced by another smell, yellow and ancient, that was worse.
Ben thought it was the smell of the mummy. To Eddie it smelled like the leper. Richie thought it smelled like the world’s oldest flannel jacket, now moldering and rotting — a lumberman’s jacket, a very big one, big enough for a character like Paul Bunyan, perhaps. To Beverly it smelled like her father’s sock-drawer. In Stan Uris it woke a dreadful memory from
his earliest childhood — an oddly Jewish memory in a boy who had only the haziest understanding of his own Jewishness. It smelled like clay mixed with oil and made him think of an eyeless, mouthless demon called the Golem, a clay man that renegade Jews were supposed to have raised in the Middle Ages to save them from the goyim who robbed them and raped their women and then sent them packing. Mike thought of the dry smell of feathers in a dead nest.
When they finally reached the end of the narrow pipe, they slithered like eels down the curved surface of another which ran at an oblique angle to the one they had been in, and found they could stand up again. Bill felt the heads of the matches left in the book. Four. His mouth tightened and he resolved not to tell the others how close they were to the end of their light . . . not unless he absolutely ha d to.
‘Huh-Huh-How you g-g-guys d-doin?’
They murmured replies, and he nodded in the dark. No panic, and no tears since Stan’s. That was good. He felt for their hands and they stood together in the dark that way for awhile, both taking and giving from the touch. Bill felt clear exultation in this, a sure sense that they were somehow producing more than the sum of their seven selves; they had been re-added into a more potent whole.
He lit one of the remaining matches and they saw a narrow tunnel stretching ahead on a downward slant. The top of this pipe was festooned with sagging cobwebs, some water-broken and hanging in shrouds. Looking at them gave Bill an atavistic chill. The floor here was dry but thick with ancient mold and what might have been leaves, fungus . . . or some unimaginable droppings. Farther up he saw a pile of bones and a drift of green rags. They might once have been that stuff they called ‘polished cotton,’ workman’s clothes. Bill imagined some Sewer Department or Water Department worker who had gotten lost, wandered down here, and been discovered . . .
The match guttered. He tipped its head downward, wanting the light to last a little longer.
‘Do y-y-you nuh-know where w-w-we are?’ he asked Eddie.
Eddie pointed down the slightly crooked bore of the tunnel. ‘Canal’s that way,’ he said. ‘Less’n half a mile, unless this thing turns in a different direction. We’re under Up-Mile Hill right now, I think. But Bill — ‘
The match burned Bill’s ringers and he let it drop. They were in darkness again. Someone — Bill thought it was Beverly — sighed. But before the match had gone out, he had seen the worry on Eddie’s face.
‘W-W-What? What ih-is it?’
‘When I say we’re under Up-Mile Hill, I mean we’re really under it. We been going down for a long time now. Nobody’d ever put sewer-pipe in this deep. When you put a tunnel this deep you call it a mine-shaft.’
‘How deep do you figure we are, Eddie?’ Richie asked.