It

and they began to pick up a vibration that might have been real or might have been only in their minds. It was steady and rhythmic.
It was a heartbeat.
‘It ends up ahead!’ Beverly cried. ‘Look! It’s a blank wall!’
But as they drew closer, antlike now on this great floor of dirty stone blocks, each block bigger than Bassey Park, it seemed, they saw that the wall was not entirely blank after all. It was broken by a single door. And although the wall itself towered hundreds of feet above them, the door was very small. It was no more than three feet high, a door of the sort you might see in a fairytale book, made of stout oaken boards bound with iron strips in an X-pattern. It was, they all realized at once, a door made only for children.
Ghostly, in his mind, Ben heard the librarian reading to the little ones: Who is that trip-trapping upon my bridge? The children lean forward, all the old fascination glistening in their eyes: will the monster be bested . . . or will It feed?
There was a mark on the door, and heaped at its foot was a pile of bones. Small bones. The bones of God alone knew how many children.
They had come to the place of It.
The mark on the door, then: what was that?
Bill marked it as a paper boat.
Stan saw it as a bird rising toward the sky — a phoenix, perhaps.
Michael saw a hooded face — that of crazy Butch Bowers, perhaps, if it could only be seen.
Richie saw two eyes behind a pair of spectacles.
Beverly saw a hand doubled up into a fist.
Eddie believed it to be the face of the leper, all sunken eyes and wrinkled snarling mouth — all disease, all sickness, was stamped into that face.
Ben Hanscom saw a tattered pile of wrappings and seemed to smell old sour spices.
Later, arriving at that same door with Belch’s screams still echoing in his ears, alone at the end of it, Henry Bowers would see it as the moon, full, ripe . . . and black.
‘I’m scared, Bill,’ Ben said in a wavering voice. ‘Do we have to?’ Bill toed the bones, and suddenly scattered them in a powdery, raiding drift with one foot. He was scared, too . . . but there was George to consider. It had ripped off George’s arm. Were those small and fragile bones among these? Yes, of course they were.
They were here for the owners of the bones, George and all the others — those who had been brought here, those who might be brought here, those who ha d been left in other places simply to rot.
‘We have to,’ Bill said.
‘What if it’s locked?’ Beverly asked in a small voice.
‘Ih-It’s not l-locked,’ Bill said, and then told her what he knew from deeper inside: ‘Pluh –haces like this are n-never luh-luh –locked.’
He placed the tented fingers of his right hand on the door and pushed. It swung open on a flood of sick yellow-green light. That zoo smell wafted out at them, incredibly strong, incredibly potent now.
One by one they passed through the fairytale door, and into the lair of It. Bill
7
In the Tunnels / 4:59 A.M.
stopped so suddenly that the others piled up like freight– cars when the engine suddenly comes to a panic-stop. ‘What is it?’ Ben called.
‘Ih-Ih– It was h– h– here. The E h – E h –Eye. D-Do you r– r– remember?’
‘I remember,’ Richie said. ‘Eddie stopped it with his aspirator. By pretending it was acid. He said something about some dance. Pretty chuckalicious, but I can’t remember exactly what it was.’
‘It d-d-doesn’t m-m-matter. We won’t suh-see anything we saw b-b-before,’ Bill said. He struck a light and looked around at the others. Their faces were luminous in the glow of the match, luminous and mystic. And they seemed very young. ‘H-H-How you guys d-doin?’
‘We’re okay, Big Bill,’ Eddie said, but his face was drawn with pain. Bill’s makeshift splint was coming apart. ‘How bout you?’
‘Oh-Oh-kay,’ Bill said, and shook out the match before his face could tell them any different story.
‘How did it happen?’ Beverly asked him, touching his arm in the dark. ‘Bill, how could she — ?’
‘B-B-Because I muh-hentioned the n-name of the town. Sh-She c-c-came ah-hafter m– m-me. Even wh-when I was d-d-doing it, suh-suh-homething ih-hinside was t-t-telling me to sh-sh-shut uh-up. B-But I d-d-didn’t luh-luh –histen.’ He shook his head helplessly in the dark.
‘But even if sh-she came to Duh-Duh-Derry, I d-d-don’t uh-hunderstand h-h-how she c-could have guh-hotten d-d-down h-here. If H-H-Henry dih-didn’t b-b-bring her, then who d-did?’
‘It,’ Ben said. ‘It doesn’t have to look bad, we know that. It could have shown up and said you were in trouble. Taken her here in order to . . . to fuck you up, I suppose. To kill our guts. Cause that’s what