He gradually realized that he was awake. The plain white room was a hospital room. Bottles hung over his head, one full of clear liquid, the other a deep dark red one. Whole blood. He saw a blank TV set bolted to the wall and became aware of the steady sound of rain beating against the window.

Mike tried to move his legs. One moved freely but the other, his right leg, wouldn't move at all. The feeling in that leg was very faint, and he realized it was tightly bandaged.

Little by little it came back. He had settled down to write in his notebook and Henry Bowers had turned up. A real blast from the past, a golden gasser. There had been a fight, and —

Henry! Where had Henry gone? After the others?

Mike groped for the call-bell. It was draped over the head of the bed, and he had it in his hands when the door opened. A nurse stood there. Two buttons of his white tunic were unbuttoned and his dark hair was mussed, giving him a rumpled Ben Casey look. He wore a

Saint Christopher medal around his neck. Even in his soupy, only-three-quarters-awake state, Mike placed him immediately. In 1958, a sixteen-year-old girl named Cheryl Lamonica had been killed in Derry, killed by It. The girl had had a fourteen-year-old brother named Mark, and this was him.

'Mark?' he said weakly. 'I have to talk to you.'

'Shhh,' Mark said. His hand was in his pocket. 'No talk.'

He walked into the room, and as he stood at the foot of the bed, Mike saw with a hopeless chill how blank Mark Lamonica's eyes were. His head was slightly cocked, as if hearing distant music. He took his hand out of his pocket.

There was a syringe in it.

'This will put you to sleep,' Mark said, and began to walk toward the bed.

11

Under the City / 6:49 A.M.

'Shhhhh!' Bill cried suddenly, although there had been no sound except their own faint footsteps.

Richie struck a light. The walls of the tunnel had moved away, and the five of them seemed very small in this space under the city. They huddled together and Beverly felt a dreamy sense of déjà vu as she observed the gigantic flagstones on the floor and the hanging nets of cobweb. They were close now. Close.

'What do you hear?' she asked Bill, trying to look everywhere as the match in Richie's hand burned down, expecting to see some new surprise come lurching or flying out of the darkness. Rodan, anyone? The alien from that gruesome movie with Sigourney Weaver? A great scuttering rat with orange eyes and silver teeth? But there was nothing — only the dusty smell of the dark, and, far away, the thunder of running water, as if the drains were filling up.

'S-S-Something ruh –ruh –wrong,' Bill said. 'Mike — '

'Mike?' Eddie asked. 'What about Mike?'

'I felt it, too,' Ben said. 'Is it . . . Bill, did he die?'

'No,' Bill said. His eyes were hazy and distant, unemotional — all of his alarm was in his tone and the defensive posture of his body. 'He . . . H-H-He . . . ' He swallowed. There was a click in his throat. His eyes widened 'Oh Oh no — !'

'Bill?' Beverly cried, alarmed. 'Bill, what is it? What — '

'Gruh-gruh-grab my hub-hands!' Bill screamed. 'Kwuh-kwuh-quick!'

Richie dropped the match and seized one of Bill's hands. Beverly grabbed the other. She groped with her free hand, and Eddie grasped it feebly with the hand at the end of his broken arm. Ben grasped his other hand and completed the circle by holding Richie's hand.

'Send him our power!' Bill cried in that same strange, deep voice. 'Send him our power,whatever You are, send him our power! Now! Now! Now!'

Beverly felt something go out from them and toward Mike. Her head rolled on her shoulders in a kind of ecstasy, and the harsh whistle of Eddie's breathing merged with the headlong thunder of water in the drains.

12

'Now,' Mark Lamonica said in a low voice. He sighed — the sigh of a man who feels orgasm approaching.

Mike pushed the call-button in his hands again and again. He could hear it ringing at the nurses' station down the hall, but no one came. With a kind of hellish second sight he understood that the nurses were sitting around down there, reading the morning paper, drinking coffee, hearing his call-bell but not hearing it, hearing but not responding, they would respond only later when it was all over, because that was how things worked in Derry. In Derry some things were better not seen or heard . . . until they were over.

Mike let the call –button fall from his hands.

Mark bent toward him, the tip of the syringe glittering. His Saint Christopher medal swung hypnotically back and forth as he drew the sheet down.

'Right there,' he whispered. The sternum.' And sighed again.

Mike suddenly felt power wash into him — some primitive power that crammed his body like volts. He stiffened, fingers splaying out as if in a convulsion. His eyes widened. A grunt jerked out of him, and that sense of dreadful paralysis was driven from him as if by a roundhouse slap.

His right hand pistoned out toward the nighttable. There was a plastic pitcher there and a heavy cafeteria –style water-glass beside it. His hand closed around the glass. Lamonica sensed the change; that dreamy, pleased ilght disappeared from his eyes and was replaced by wary confusion. He drew back a bit, and then Mike brought the glass up and smashed it into his face.

Lamonica screamed and staggered backward, dropping the syringe. His hands went to his spouting face; blood ran down his wrists and splashed on his white tunic.

The power left as suddenly as it had come. Mike looked dully at the shards of broken glass on the bed and his hospital johnny and his own bleeding hand. He heard the quick, light sound of crepe-soled shoes in the hall, approaching.

Now they come, he thought, Oh yes, now. And after they're gone, who'll show up? Who'll show up next?

As they burst into his room, the nurses who had sat calmly on station as his call-bell rang frantically, Mike closed his eyes and prayed for it to be over. He prayed his friends were somewhere under the city, he prayed they were all right, he prayed they would end it.

He didn't know exactly Who he prayed to . . . but he prayed nonetheless.

13

Under the City / 6:54 A.M.

'He's a-a-all ruh –right,' Bill said presently.

Ben didn't know how long they had stood in the darkness, holding hands. It seemed to him that he had felt something — something from them, from their circle — go out and then come back. But he did not know where that thing — if it existed at all — had gone, or done.

'Are you sure, Big Bill?' Richie asked.

'Y-Y-Yes.' Bill released Richie's hand and Beverly's. 'But we h-have to finish this as kwuh-quick as we c-can. C-Come oh-oh-on.'

They went on, Richie or Bill periodically lighting matches. We don't have so much as apea-shooter among us, Ben thought. But that's part of it, too, isn't it? Chüd. What does that mean? What was It, exactly? What was Its final face? And even if we didn't kill It, we hurt It. How did we do that?

The chamber they walked through — it could no longer be called a tunnel — grew larger and larger. Their footfalls echoed. Ben remembered the smell, that thick zoo smell. He became aware that the matches were no longer necessary — there was light now, light of a sort: a ghastly effulgence that was growing steadily stronger. In that marshy light, his friends all looked like walking corpses.

'Wall up ahead, Bill,' Eddie said.

'I nuh-nuh –know.'

Ben felt his heart begin to pick up speed. There was a sour taste in his mouth and his head had begun to ache. He felt slow and frightened. He felt fat.

'The door,' Beverly whispered.

Yes, here it was. Once, twenty-seven years before, they had been able to pass through that door by doing no more than ducking their heads. Now they would have to duck-walk their way through, or crawl on hands and knees. They had grown; here was final proof, if final proof were needed.