It

‘Quarter of a mile,’ Eddie said. ‘Maybe more.’
‘Jesus –please-us,’ Beverly said.
‘These aren’t sewer-pipes, anyway,’ Stan said from behind them. ‘You can tell by that smell. It’s bad, but it’s not a sewery smell.’
‘I think I’d rather smell the sewer,’ Ben said. ‘It smells like — ‘
A scream fl oated down to them, issuing from the mouth of the pipe they had just left, lifting the hair on the nape of Bill’s neck. The seven of them drew together, clutching each other.
‘ — gonna get you sons of bitches. We’re gonna get youuuuuuu —
‘Henry,’ Eddie breathed. ‘Oh my God, he’s still coming.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Richie said. ‘Some people are too stupid to quit.’
They could hear faint panting, the scrape of shoes, the whisper of cloth.
‘ — youuuuuuuuu —
‘Cuh-Cuh-Come on,’ Bill said.
They started down the pipe, now walking double except for Mike, who was at the back of the line: Bill and Eddie, Richie and Bev, Ben and Stan.
‘H-H-How fuh-far b-b-back do y-you think H-H-Henry ih-his?’
‘I couldn’t tell, Big Bill,’ Eddie said. The echoes are bad.’ He dropped his voice. ‘Did you see that pile of bones?’
‘Y-Y-Yes,’ Bill said, dropping his own voice.
There was a tool-belt with the clothes. I think it was a Water Department guy.’
‘I guh-guess s-s-so.’
‘How long you think — ?’
‘I d-d-don’t nuh-nuh –know.’ I Eddie closed his good hand over Bill’s arm in the darkness.
It was perhaps fifteen minutes later when they heard something coming toward them in the dark.
Richie stopped, frozen cold all the way through. Suddenly he was three years old again. He listened to that squelching, shifting movement — closing in on them, closing — and to the whispering branchlike sounds that accompanied it, and even before Bill struck a match he knew what it would be.
‘The Eye!’ he screamed. ‘Christ, it’s the Crawling Eye!’
For a moment the others were not sure what they were seeing (Beverly had an impression that her father had found her, even down here, and Eddie had a fleeting vision of Patrick Hockstetter come back to life, somehow Patrick had flanked them and gotten in front of them), but Richie’s cry, Richie’s certainty, froze the shape for all of them. They saw what Richie saw.
A gigantic Eye filled the tunnel, the glassy black pupil two feet across, the iris a muddy russet color. The white was bulgy, membranous, laced with red veins that pulsed steadily. It was a lidless lashless gelatinous horror that moved on a bed of raw-looking tentacles. These fumbled over the tunnel’s crumbly surface and sank in like fingers, so that the impression given in the glow of Bill’s guttering match was of an Eye that had somehow grown nightmare fingers which were pulling It along.
It stared at them with blank, feverish avarice. The match went out.
In the darkness, Bill felt those branchlike tentacles caress his ankles, his shins . . . but he could not move. His body was frozen solid. He sensed It approaching, he could feel the heat radiating out from It, and could hear the wet pulse of blood wetting Its membranes. He ima gined the stickiness he would feel when It touched him and still he could not scream. Even when fresh tentacles slipped around his waist and hooked themselves into the loops of his jeans and began to drag him forward, he could not scream or struggle. A deadly sleepiness seemed to have suffused his whole body.
Beverly felt one of the tentacles slip around the cup of her ear and suddenly draw noose-tight. Paul flared and she was dragged forward, twisting and moaning, as if an old –lady schoolteacher were giving her an out-of-patience come –along to the back of the room, where she would be forced to sit on a stool and wear a duncecap. Stan and Richie tried to back away, but a forest of unseen tentacles now wavered and whispered about them. Ben put an arm around Beverly and tried to tug her back. She clasped his hands with panicky tightness.
‘Ben . . . Ben, It’s got me . . . ‘
‘No It don’t . . . Wait . . . I’ll pull . . . ‘
He pulled with all his might, and Beverly screamed as pain tore through her ear and blood began to flow. A tentacle, dry and hard, scraped over Ben’s shirt, paused, then twisted in a painful knot around his shoulder.
Bill put out a hand, and it slapped into a gluey yielding wetness. The Eye! his mind screamed. Oh God I got my hand in the Eye! Oh God! Oh dear sweet God! The Eye! My hand in the Eye!