Eddie, lost in these memories, walked from the place where home had been, across the pitcher's mound (only it had never been a mound; it had been a depression from which the gravel had been scraped clean), and out into shortstop country. He paused briefly, struck by the silence, and then strolled on out to the chainlink fence. It was rustier than ever, and overgrown by some sort of ugly climbing vine, but still there. Looking through it, he could see how the ground sloped away, aggressively green.

The Barrens were more junglelike than ever, and for the first time he found himself wondering why a stretch of such tangled and virulent growth should have been called the Barrens at all: it was many things, but barren was not one of them. Why not ht e Wilderness? Or the Jungle?

Barrens.

It had an ominous, almost sinister sound, but what it conjured up in the mind were not tangles of shrubs and trees so thick they had to fight for sunspace; it called up pictures of sand dunes shifting away end lessly, or gray slate expanses of hardpan and desert. Barren. Mike had said earlier that they were all barren, and it seemed true enough. Seven of them, and not a kid among them. Even in these days of planned parenthood, that was bucking the odds.

He looked through the rusty diamond –shapes, hearing the far-away drone of cars on Kansas Street, the faraway trickle and rush of water down below. He could see glints of it in the spring sunshine, like flashes of glass. The bamboo stands were still down there, looking unhealthily white, like patches of fungus in all the green. Beyond them, in the marshy stretches of ground bordering the Kenduskeag, there was supposed to have been quickmud.

I spent the happiest times of my childhood down there in that mess, he thought, and shivered.

He was about to turn away when something else caught his eye: a cement cylinder with a heavy steel cap on the top. Morlock holes, Ben used to call them, laughing with his mouth but not quite laughing with his eyes. If you went over to one, it would stand maybe waist-high on you (if you were a kid) and you would see the words DERRY DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC WORKS stamped in raised metal in a semicircle. And you could hear a humming noise from deep inside. Some sort of machinery.

Morlock holes.

That's where we went. In August. In the end. We went into one of Ben's Morlock holes, into the sewers, but after awhile they weren't sewers anymore. They were . . . were . . . what?

Patrick Hockstetter was down there. Before It took him Beverly saw him doing something bad. It made her laugh but she knew it was bad. Something to do with Henry Bowers, wasn't it? Yes, I think so. And —

He turned away suddenly and started back toward the abandoned depot, not wanting to look down into the Barrens anymore, not liking the thoughts they conjured up. He wanted to be home with Myra. He didn't want to be here. He . . .

'Catch, kid!'

He turned toward the sound of the voice and here came some sort of a ball, right over the fence and toward him. It struck the gravel and bounced. Eddie stuck out his hand and caught it. In his unthinking reflex the catch was so neat it was almost elegant.

He looked down at what was in his hand and everything inside him went cool and loose. Once it had been a baseball. Now it was only a string-wrapped sphere, because the cover had been knocked off. He could see the string trailing away. It went over the top of the fence like a strand of spiderweb and disappeared into the Barrens.

Oh Jesus, he thought. Oh Jesus, Its here, It's here with me NOW —

'Come on down and play, Eddie,' the voice on the other side of the fence said, and Eddie realized with a fainting sort of horror that it was the voice of Belch Huggins, who had been murdered in the tunnels under Derry in August of 1958. And now here was Belch himself, struggling up and over the bank on the other side of the fence.

He wore a pinstriped New York Yankees baseball uniform that was flecked with bits of autumn leaves and smeared with green. He was Belch but he was also the leper, a creature hideously arisen from long years in a wet grave. The flesh of his heavy face hung in putrescent strings and runners. One eyesocket was empty. Things squirmed in his hair. He wore a moss-slimed baseball-glo ve on one hand. He poked the rotting fingers of his right hand through the diamonds of the chainlink fence, and when he curled them, Eddie heard a dreadful squirting sound which he thought might drive him mad.

'That one would have been out of Yankee Stadium,' Belch said, and grinned. A toad, noxiously white and squirming, dropped from his mouth and tumbled to the ground. 'Do you hear me? That one would have been out of fucking Yankee Stadium! And by the way, Eddie, do you want a blow job? I'll do it for a dime. Hell, I'll do it for free.'

Belch's face changed. The jellylike bulb of nose fell in, revealing two raw red channels that Eddie had seen in his dreams. His hair coarsened and drew back from his temples, turned cobweb-white. The rotting skin on his forehead split open, revealing white bone covered with a mucusy substance, like the bleared lens of a searchlight. Belch was gone; the thing which had been under the porch at 29 Neibolt Street was here now.

'Bobby blows me for a dime,' it crooned, beginning to climb the fence. It left little pieces of its flesh in the diamond shapes the crisscrossing wires made. The fence jingled and rattled with its weight. When it touched the climbing, vinelike weeds, they turned black. 'He will do it anytime. Fifteen cents for overtime.'

Eddie tried to scream. Nothing but a dry senseless squeak came out of him. His lungs felt like the world's oldest ocarinas. He looked down at the ball in his hand and suddenly blood began to sweat up from between the wrapped strings. It pattered to the gravel and splashed on his loafers.

He threw it down and took two lurching stagger-steps backward, his eyes bulging from his face, rubbing his hands on the front of his shirt. The leper had reached the top of the fence. Its head swayed in silhouette against the sky, a nightmare shape like a bloated Halloween jackolantern. Its tongue lolled out, four feet long, perhaps six. It twined its way down the fence like a snake from the leper's grinning mouth.

There one second . . . gone the next.

It did not fade, like a ghost in a movie; it simply winked out of existence. But Eddie heard a sound which confirmed its essential solidity: a pop! sound, like a cork blowing out of a champagne bottle. It was the sound of air rushing in to fill the place where the leper had been.

He turned and began to run, but before he had gone ten feet, four stiff shapes flew out from the shadows under the loading– bay of the abandoned brick depot. He thought at first they were bats and he screamed and covered his head . . . Then he saw that they were squares of canvas — the squares of canvas that had been the bases when the big kids played here.

They whirled and twirled in the still air; he had to duck to avoid one of them. They settled in the ir accustomed places all at once, kicking up little puffs of grit: home, first, second, third.

Gasping, his breath short in his throat, Eddie ran past home plate, his lips drawn back, his face as white as cottage cheese.

WHACK! The sound of a bat hitting a phantom ball. And then —

Eddie stopped, the strength going out of his legs, a groan passing his lips. The ground was bulging in a straight line from home to first, as if a gigantic gopher was tunneling rapidly just below the surface of the ground. Gravel rolled off to either side. The shape under the earth reached the base and the canvas flipped up into the air. It went up so hard and fast it made a popping sound — the sound a shoeshine kid makes when he's feeling good and pops the rag. The ground began to ridge between first and second, racing and racing. Second base flew into the air with a similar popping sound and had barely settled back before the shape under the ground had reached third and was racing for home.