Yeah. Sitting here now he could believe it all . . . and looking at their somber faces as they studied the flames and the charring pages of Mike's Archie funny book, he could see that they believed it, too.

The branches were catching. The clubhouse began to fill up with smoke. Some of it, white as cotton smoke-signals in a Saturday-matinee movie starring Randolph Scott or Audie Murphy, escaped from the smoke-hole. But with no moving air outside to create a draft, most of it stayed below. It had an acrid bite that made eyes sting and throats throb. Richie heard Eddie cough twice — a flat sound like dry boards being whacked together — and then fall silent again. He shouldn't be down here, he thought . . . but something else apparently felt otherwise.

Bill tossed another handful of green twigs on the smoldering fire and asked in a thin voice that was not much like his usual speaking voice: 'Anyone having a-any vih-v i h –visions?'

'Visions of getting out of here,' Stan Uris said. Beverly laughed at this, but her laughter turned into a fit of coughing and choking.

Richie leaned his head back against the wall and looked up at the smoke– h o l e — a t h i n rectangle of mellow white light. He thought about the Paul Bunyan statue that day in March . . . but that had only been a mirage, a hallucination, a

(vision)

'Smoke's killin me,' Ben said. 'Whoo!'

'So leave,' Richie murmured, not taking his eyes off the smoke-hole. He felt as if he was getting a handle on this. He felt as if he had lost ten pounds. And he sure as shit felt as if the clubhouse had gotten bigger. Damn straight on that last. He had been sitting with Ben Hanscom's fat right leg squashed against his left one and Bill Denbrough's bony left shoulder socked into his right arm. Now he was touching neither of them. He glanced lazily to his right and left to verify that his perception was true, and it was. Ben was a foot or so to his left. On his right, Bill was even farther away.

'Place is bigger, friends and neighbors,' he said. He took a deeper breath and coughed hard. It hurt, hurt deep in his chest, the way a cough hurt when you had the flu or the grippe or something. For awhile he thought it would never pass; that he would just go on coughing until they had to pull him out. If they still can, he thought, but the thought was really too dim to be frightening.

Then Bill was pounding him on the back, and the coughing fit passed.

'You don't know you don't always,' Richie said. He was looking at the smoke-hole again instead of at Bill. How bright it seemed! When he closed his eyes he could still see the rectangle, floating there in the dark, but bright green instead of bright white.

'Whuh-whuh –what do you m-mean?' Bill asked.

'Stutter.' He paused, aware that someone else was coughing but not sure who it was. 'You ought to do the Voices, not me, Big Bill. You — '

The coughing got louder. Suddenly the clubhouse was flooded with daylight, so sudden and so bright Richie had to squint against it. He could just make out Stan Uris, climbing and clawing his way out.

'Sorry,' Stan managed, through his spasmodic coughing. 'Sorry, can't — '

'It's all right,' Richie heard himself say. 'You doan need no stinkin' batches.' His voice sounded as if it were coming from a different body.

The trapdoor slammed shut a moment later, but enough fresh air had come in to clear his head a little. Before Ben moved over a little to fill the space Stan had vacated, Richie became aware of Ben's leg again, pressing his. How had he gotten the idea that the clubhouse had gotten bigger?

Mike Hanlon threw more sticks on the smoky fire. Richie resumed taking shallow breaths and looking up at the smoke-hole. He had no sense of real time passing, but he was vaguely aware that, in addition to the smoke, the clubhouse was getting good and hot.

He looked around, looked at his friends. They were hard to see, half-swallowed in shadowsmoke and still white summerlight. Bev's head was tilted back against a piece of shoring, her hands on her knees, her eyes closed, tears trickling down her cheeks toward her earlobes. Bill was sitting cross-legged, his chin on his chest. Ben was —

But suddenly Ben was getting to his feet, pushing the trapdoor open again.

'There goes Ben,' Mike said. He was sitting Indian-fashion directly across from Richie, his eyes as red as a weasel's.

Comparative coolness struck them again. The air freshened as smoke swirled up through the trap. Ben was coughing and dry-retching. He pulled himself out with Stan's help, and before either of them could close the trapdoor, Eddie was staggering to his feet, his face a deadly pale except for the bruised-looking patches under his eyes and traced just below his cheekbones. His thin chest was hitching up and down in quick, shallow spasms. He groped

weakly for the edge of the escape hatch and would have fallen if Ben had not grabbed hand and Stan the other.

'Sorry,' Eddie managed in a squeaky little whisper, and then they hauled him up. The trapdoor banged down again.

There was a long, quiet period. The smoke built up until it was a thick still fog in the clubhouse. Looks like a pea-souper to me, Watson, Richie thought, and for a moment he imagined himself as Sherlock Holmes (a Holmes who looked a great deal like Basil Rathbone and who was totally black and white), moving purposefully along Baker Street; Moriarty was somewhere near, a hansom cab awaited, and the game was afoot.

The thought was amazingly clear, amazingly solid. It seemed almost to have weight, as if it were not a little pocket-daydream of the sort he had all the time (batting cleanup for the Bosox, bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, and there it goes, it's up . . . ITS GONE! Home run,Tozier . . . and that breaks the Babe's record!), but something that was almost real.

There was still enough of the wiseacre in him to think that if all he was getting out of this was a vision of Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, then the whole idea of visions was pretty overrated.

Except of course it isn't Moriarty that's out there. It's out there — some It — and It's real. It —

Then the trapdoor opened again and Beverly was struggling her way out, coughing dryly, one hand cupped over her mouth. Ben got one hand and Stan grabbed her under the other arm. Half-pulled, half-scrambling under her own power, she was up and gone.

'Ih-Ih-It i-is bi-higger,' Bill said.

Richie looked around. He saw the circle of stones with the fire smoldering within, fuming out clouds of smoke. Across the way he saw Mike sitting cross-legged like a totem carved from mahogany, staring at him through the fire with his smoke-reddened eyes. Except Mike was better than twenty yards away, and Bill was even farther away, on Richie's right. The underground clubhouse was now at least the size of a ballroom.

'Doesn't matter,' Mike said. 'It's gonna come pretty quick. Somethin is.'

'Y-Y-Yeah,' Bill said. 'But I . . . I . . . I — '

He began to cough. He tried to control it, but the cough worsened, a dry rattling. Dimly Richie saw Bill stumble to his feet, lunge for the trapdoor, and shove it open.

'Guh-Guh-Go od luh –luh –luh — '

And then he was gone, dragged up by the others.

'Looks like it's you and me, ole Mikey,' Richie said, and then he began to cough himself. 'I thought for sure that it would be Bill — '

The cough worsened. He doubled over, hacking dryly, unable to get his breath. His head was thudding — whacking — like a turnip filled with blood. His eyes teared behind his glasses.

From far away, he heard Mike saying: 'Go on up if you have to, Richie. Don't go flippy. Don't kill yourself.'

He raised a hand toward Mike and flapped it at him

(no stinkin batches)