This time Richie was able to get to his feet. For a moment he was quite sure he was going to retch again, or faint, or both. 'Whacko,' he murmured, watching the world waver and warp in front of his eyes. When the feeling passed, he made his way over to where Mike was. Mike's eyes were still weasel-red, and from the dampness on his pants cuffs, Richie thought that maybe ole Mikey had taken a ride on the stomach-elevator, too.

'For a white boy you did pretty good,' Mike croaked, and punched Richie weakly on the shoulder.

Richie was at a loss for words — a condition of exquisite rarity.

Bill came over. The others came with him.

'You pulled us out?' Richie asked.

'M-Me and Buh-Ben. Y-You were scuh-scuh-rheaming. B-Both of y-y-you. B-B-But — ' He looked over at Ben.

Ben said, 'It must have been the smoke, Bill.' But there was no conviction in the big boy's voice at all.

Flatly, Richie said: 'You mean what I think you mean?'

Bill shrugged. 'W-W-What's th-that, Rih –Richie?'

Mike answered. 'We weren't there at first, were we? You went down because you heard us screaming, but at first we weren't there.'

'It was really smoky,' Ben said. 'Hearing you both screaming that way, that was scary enough. But the screaming . . . it sounded . . . well . . . '

'It s-s-sounded very f-f-f-far a-away,' Bill said. Stuttering badly, he told them that when he and Ben had gone down, they hadn't been able to see either Richie or Mike. They had gone plunging around in the smoky clubhouse, panicked, scared that if they didn't act quickly the two boys might die of smoke poisoning. At last Bill had gripped a hand — Richie's. He had given 'a huh-huh-hell of a yuh-yank' and Richie had come flying out of the gloom, only about one-quarter conscious. When Bill turned around he had seen Be n with Mike in a bear-hug, both of them coughing. Ben had thrown Mike up and out through the trapdoor.

Ben listened to all this, nodding.

'I kept grabbing, you know? Really not doing anything except jabbing my hand out like I wanted to shake hands. You grabbed it, Mike. Damn good thing you grabbed it when you did. I think you were just about gone.'

'You guys make the clubhouse sound a lot bigger than it is,' Richie said. 'Talking about stumbling around in it and all. It's only five feet on every side.'

There was a moment's silence while they all looked at Bill, who stood in frowning concentration.

'It w-w-was b-bigger,' he said at last. 'W-W-Wasn't it, Ben?'

Ben shrugged. 'It sure seemed like it. Unless it was the smoke.'

'It wasn't the smoke,' Richie said. 'Just before it happened — before we went out — I remember thinking it was at least as big as a ballroom in a movie. Like one of those musicals. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, something like that. I could barely see Mike against the other wall.'. .

'Before you went out?' Beverly asked.

'Well . . . what I mean . . . like . . . '

She grabbed Richie's arm. 'It happened, didn't it? It really happened! You had a vision, just like in Ben's book!' Her face was glowing. 'It really happened?

Richie looked down at himself, and then at Mike. One of the knees of Mike's corduroy pants was out, and both the knees of his own jeans were torn. He could look through the holes and see bleeding scrapes on both his knees.

'If it was a vision, I never want to have another one,' he said. 'I don't know about de Kingfish over there, but when I went down there, I didn't have any holes in my pants. They're practically new, for gosh sakes. My mom's gonna give me hell.'

'What happened?' Ben and Eddie asked together.

Richie and Mike exchanged a glance and then Richie said, 'Bevvie, you got a smoke?'

She had two, wrapped in a piece of tissue. Richie put one of them in his mouth and when she lit it the first drag made him cough so badly that he handed it back to her. 'Can't,' he said. 'Sorry.'

'It was the past,' Mike said.

'Shit on that,' Richie said. 'It wasn't just the past. It was ago.'

'Yeah, right. We were in the Barrens, but the Kenduskeag was going a mile a minute. It was deep. It was fuckin wild. Sorry, Bevvie, but it was. And there were fish in it. Salmon, I think.'

'M-My d-d-dad s-says th-there haven't been a-a-any fuh-fish in the K-Kendusk-k-keag for a l-l-long tuh-hime. B-Because of the suh-sewage.'

'This was a long time, all right,' Richie said. He looked around at them uncertainly. 'I think it was a million years ago, at least.'

A thunderstruck silence greeted this. Beverly broke it at last. 'But what happened?'

Richie felt the words in his throat, but he had to struggle to bring them out. It felt almost like vomiting again. 'We saw It come,' he said at last. 'I think that was it.'

'Christ,' Stan muttered. 'Oh Christ.'

There was a sharp hiss-gasp as Eddie used his aspirator.

'It came out of the sky,' Mike said. 'I never want to see anything like that again in my whole life. It was burning so hot you couldn't really look at it. And it was thowin off electricity and makin thunder. The noise . . . ' He shook his head and looked at Ric hie. 'It sounded like the end of the world. And when it hit, it started a forest fire. That was at the end of it.'

'Was it a spaceship?' Ben asked.

'Yes,' Richie said. 'No,' Mike said.

They looked at each other.

'Well, I guess it was,' Mike said, and at the same time Richie said: 'No, it really wasn't a spaceship, you know, but — '

They paused again while the others looked at them, perplexed.

'You tell,' Richie said to Mike. 'We mean the same thing, I think, but they're not getting it.'

Mike coughed into his fist and then looked up at the others, almost apologetically. 'I don't know just how to tell you,' he said.

'T-T-Try,' Bill said urgently.

'It came out of the sky,' Mike repeated, 'but it wasn't a spaceship, exactly. It wasn't a meteor, either. It was more like . . . well . . . like the Ark of the Covenant, in the Bible, that was supposed to have the Spirit of God inside of it . . . except this wasn't God. Just feeling It, watching It come, you knew It meant bad, that It was bad.'

He looked at them.

Richie nodded. 'It came from . . . outside. I got that feeling. From outside.'

'Outside where, Richie?' Eddie asked.

'Outside everything,' Richie said. 'And when It came down . . . It made the biggest damn hole you ever saw in your life. It turned this big hill into a doughnut, just about. It landed right where the downtown part of Derry is now.'

He looked at them. 'Do you get it?'

Beverly dropped the cigarette half-smoked and crushed it out under one shoe.

Mike said. 'It's always been here, since the beginning of time . . . since before there were m e n anywhere, unless maybe there were just a few of them in Africa somewhere, swinging through the trees or living in caves. The crater's gone now, and ht e ice age probably scraped the valley deeper and changed some stuff around and filled the crater in . . . but It was here then, sleeping, maybe, waiting for the ice to melt, waiting for the people to come.'

That's why It uses the sewers and the drains ,' Richie put in. They must be regular freeways for It.'

'You didn't see what It looked like?' Stan Uris asked abruptly and a little hoarsely.

They shook their heads.

'Can we beat It?' Eddie said in the silence. 'A thing like that?' No one answered.