'Toward the Canal?' Eddie asked, shaking in Bill's arms.

'Yes!'

To the right. Past Patrick . . . or over him.' Eddie's voice suddenly hardened. 'I don't care that much. He was one of the ones that broke my arm. Spit in my face, too.'

'Let's guh-go,' Bill said, looking back at the sewer-pipe they had just quitted. 'S-Single luh-line! Keep a t-t-touch on e-each uh-uh-other, like b-b-before!'

He groped forward, dragging his right shoulder along the slimy porcelain surface of the pipe, gritting his teeth, not wanting to step on Patrick . . . or into him.

So they crawled farther into the darkness while waters rushed around them and while, outside, the storm walked and talked and brought an early darkness to Derry — a darkness that screamed with wind and stuttered with electric fire and racketed with falling trees that sounded like the death-cries of huge prehistoric creatures.

3

It / May 1985

Now they were coming again, and while everything had gone much as It had foreseen, something It had not foreseen had returned: that maddening, galling fear . . . that sense of Another. It hated the fear, would have turned on it and eaten it if It could have . . . but the fear danced mockingly out of reach, and It could only kill the fear by kitting them.

Surely there was no need for such fear; they were older now, and their number had been reduced from seven to five. Five was a number of power, but it did not have the mystical talismanic quality of seven. It was true that Its dogsbody hadn't been able to kill the librarian, but the librarian would die in the hospital. Later, just before dawn touched the sky, It would send a male nurse with a bad pill habit to finish the librarian once and for all.

The writer's woman was now with It, alive yet not alive — her mind had been utterly destroyed by her first sight of It as It really was, with all of Its little masks and glamours thrown aside — and all of the glamours were only mirrors, of course, throwing back at the terrifie d viewer the worst thing in his or her own mind, heliographing images as a mirror may bounce a reflection of the sun into a wide unsuspecting eye and stun it to blindness.

Now the mind of the writer's wife was with It, in It, beyond the end of the macroverse; in the darkness beyond the Turtle; in the outlands beyond all lands.

She was in Its eye; she was in Its mind.

She was in the deadlights.

Oh but the glamours were amusing. Hanlon, for instance. He would not remember, not consciously, but his mother could have told him where the bird he had seen at the Ironworks came from. When he was a baby only six months old, his mother had left him sleeping in his cradle in the side yard while she went around back to hang sheets and diapers on the line. His screams had brought her on the run. A large crow had lighted on the edge of the carriage and was pecking at baby Mikey like an evil creature in a nursery tale. He had been screaming in pain and terror, unable to drive away the crow, which had sensed weak prey. She had struck the bird with her fist and driven it off, seen that it had brought blood in two or three places on baby Mikey's arms, and taken him to Dr Stillwagon for a tetanus shot. A part of Mike had remembered that always — tiny baby, giant bird — and when It came to Mike, Mike had seen the giant bird again.

But when the dogsbody husband of the girl from before brought the writer's woman, It had put on no face — It did not dress when It was at home. The dogsbody husband had looked once an d had dropped dead of shock, his face gray, his eyes filling with the blood that had

squirted out of his brain in a dozen places. The writer's woman had put out one powerful, horrified thought — OH DEAR JESUS IT IS FEMALE — and then all thoughts ceased. She swam in the deadlights. It came down from Its place and took care of her physical remains; prepared them for later feeding. Now Audra Denbrough hung high up in the middle of things, crisscrossed in silk, her head lolling against the socket of her shoulder, her eyes wide and glazed, her toes pointing down.

But there was still power in them. Diminished but still there. They had come here as children and somehow, against all the odds, against all that was supposed to be, all that could be, they had hurt It badly, had almost killed It, had forced It to flee deep into the earth, where it huddled, hurt and hating and trembling in a spreading pool of Its own strange blood.

So another new thing, if you please: for the first time in Its neverending history, It needed to make a plan; for the first time It found Itself afraid simply to take what It wanted from Derry, Its private game-preserve.

It had always fed well on children. Many adults could be used without knowing they had been used, and It had even fed on a few of the older ones over the years — adults had their own terrors, and their glands could be tapped, opened so that all the chemicals of fear flooded the body and salted the meat. But their fears were mostly too complex. The fears of children were simpler and usually more powerful. The fears of children could often be summoned up in a single face . . . and if bait were needed, why, what child did not love a clown?

It understood vaguely that these children had somehow turned Its own tools against It — that, by coincidence (surely not on purpose, surely not guided by the hand of any Other), by the bonding of seven extraordinarily imaginative minds, It had been Drought into a zone of great danger. Any of these seven alone would have been Its meat and drink, and if they had not happened to come together, It surely would have picked them off one by one, drawn by the quality of their minds just as a lion might be drawn to one particular waterhole by the scent of zebra. But together they had discovered an alarming secret that even It had not been aware of: that belief has a second edge. If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one — probably a child — who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home.

Yet in the end It had escaped; had gone deep, and the exhausted, terrified children had elected not to follow It when It was at Its most vulnerable. They had elected to believe It dead or dying, and had retreated.

It was aware of their oath, and had known they would come back just as a lion knows the zebra will eventually return to the waterhole. It had begun to plan even as It began to drowse. When It woke It would be healed, renewed — but their childhoods would be burned away like seven fatty candles. The former power of their imaginations would be muted and weak. They would no longer imagine that there were piranha in the Kenduskeag or that if you stepped on a crack you might really break your mother's back or that if you killed a ladybug which lit on your shin your house would catch fire that night. Instead, they would believe in insurance. Instead, they would believe in wine with dinner — something nice but not too pretentious, like a Pouilly-Fuissé '83, and let that breathe, waiter, would you? Instead, they would believe that Rolaids consume forty-seven times their own weight in excess stomach acid. Instead, they would believe in public television, Gary Hart, running to prevent heart attacks, giving up red meat to prevent colon cancer. They would believe in Dr Ruth when it came to getting well fucked and Jerry Falwell when it came to getting well saved. As each year passed their dreams would grow smaller. And when It woke It would call them back, yes, back, because fear was fertile, its child was rage, and rage cried for revenge.

It would call them and then kill them.