'What are you doing? Richie asked, and his shocked voice cracked on the last word.

'I know something,' Beverly said in the dark, and to Bill her voice sounded older. 'I know because my father told me. I know how to bring us back together. And if we're not together we'll never get out.'

'What?' Ben asked, sounding bewildered and terrified. 'What are you talking about?'

'Something that will bring us together forever. Something that will show — '

'Nuh-Nuh-No, B-B-Beverly!' Bill said, suddenly understanding, understanding everything.

' — that will show that I love you all,' Beverly said, 'that you're all my friends.'

'What's she t — ' Mike began.

Calmly, Beverly cut across his words. 'Who's first?' she asked. 'I think

8

In the Lair of It / 1985

he's dying,' Beverly wept. 'His arm, It ate his arm — She reached for Bill, clung to him, and Bill shook her off.

'It's getting away again!' he roared at her. Blood caked his lips and chin. 'Cuh-Cuh-Come on! Richie! B-B-Ben! This tuh-time we're g-g-going to fuh-hinish her!'

Richie turned Bill toward him, looked at him as you would look at a man who is hopelessly raving. 'Bill, we have to take care of Eddie. We have to get a tourniquet on him, get him out of here.'

But Beverly was now sitting with Eddie's head in her lap, cradling him. She had closed his eyes. 'Go with Bill,' she said. 'If you let him die for nothing . if It comes back in another twenty-five years, or fifty, or even two thousand, I swear I'll . . . I'll haunt your ghosts. Go!'

Richie looked at her for a moment, indecisive. Then he became aware that her face was losing definition, becoming not a face but a pale shape in the growing shadows. The light was fading. It decided him. 'All right,' he said to Bill. 'This time we chase.'

Ben was standing in back of the spiderweb, which had begun to decay again. He had also seen the shape swaying high up in it, and he prayed that Bill would not look up.

But as the web began to fall in drifts and strands and skeins, Bill did.

He saw Audra, sagging as if in a very old and creaky elevator. She dropped ten feet, stopped, swaying from side to side, and then abruptly dropped another fifteen. Her face never changed. Her eyes, china-blue, were wide open. Her bare feet swung back and forth like pendulums. Her hair hung lankly over her shoulders. Her mouth was ajar.

'AUDRA!' he screamed.

'Bill, come on!' Ben shouted.

The web was falling all around them now, thudding to the floor and beginning to run. Richie suddenly grabbed Bill around the waist, and propelled him forward, shooting for a ten-foot-high gap between the floor and the bottommost cross-strand of the sagging web. 'Go, Bill! Go! Go!'

'That's Audra!' Bill shouted desperately. 'Thuh-That's AUDRA!'

'I don't give a shit if it's the Pope,' Richie said grimly. 'Eddie's dead and we're going to kill It, if It's still alive. We're going to finish the job this time, Big Bill. Either she's alive or she's not. Now come on!'

Bill hung back a moment longer, and then snapshots of the children, all the dead children, seemed to flutter through his mind like lost photographs from George's album. SCHOOL FRIENDS.

'A-A11 ruh-right. Let's g-go. Guh –Guh-God forgive m-me.'

He and Richie ran under the strand of cross-webbing seconds before it collapsed, and joined Ben on the other side. They ran after It as Audra swung and dangled fifty feet above the stone floor, wrapped in a numbing cocoon that was attached to the decaying web.

9

Ben

They followed the trail of Its black blood — oily pools of ichor that ran and dripped into the cracks between the flagstones. But as the floor began to rise toward a semicircular black opening at the far side of the chamber, Ben saw something new: a trail of eggs. Each was black and rough-shelled, perhaps as big as an ostrich– e g g . A w a x y l i g h t s h o n e f r o m w i t h i n them. Ben realized they were semi-transparent; he could see bla ck shapes moving inside.

Its children, he thought, and felt his gorge rise. Its miscarried children. God! God!

Richie and Bill had stopped and were staring at the eggs with stupid, dazed wonder.

'Go on! Go on!' Ben shouted. 'I'll take care of them! Get It!'

'Here!' Richie shouted, and threw Ben a pack of Derry Town House matches.

Ben caught them. Bill and Richie ran on. Ben watched them in the rapidly dimming light for a moment. They ran into the darkness of Its escape-passage and were lost from sight. Then he looked down at the first of the thin-shelled eggs, at the black, mantalike shadow inside, and felt his determination waver. This . . . hey guys, this was too much. This was simply too awful. And surely they would die without his help; they had not been so much laid as dropped.

But It's time was close . . . and if one of them is capable of surviving . . . even one . . .

Summoning all of his courage, summoning up Eddie's pale, dying face, Ben brought one Desert Driver boot down on the first egg. It broke with a sodden squelch as some stinking placenta ran out around his boot. Then a spider the size of a rat was scrabbling weakly across the floor, trying to get away, and Ben could hear it in his head, its high mewling cries like the sound of a handsaw being bent rapidly back and forth so that it makes ghost-music.

Ben lurched after it on legs that felt like stilts and brought his foot down again. He felt the spider's body crunch and splatter under the heel of his boot. His gorge clenched and this time there was no way he could hold back. He vomited, then twisted his heel, grinding the thing into the stones, listening to the cries in his head fade to nothing.

How many? How many eggs? Didn't I read somewhere that spiders can lay thousands . . . or millions? I can't keep doing this, I'll go mad —

You have to. You have to. Come on, Ben . . . get it together!

He went to the next egg and repeated the process in the last of the dying lieht Everything was repeated: the brittle snap, the squelch of liquid, the final coup de grâce. The next. The next. The next. Making his way slowly toward the black arch into which his friends had gone. The darkness was complete now Beverly and the decaying web somewhere behind him. He could still hear the whisper of its collapse. The eggs were pallid stones in the dark. As he reached each one he struck a light from the matchbook and broke it open. In each case he was able to follow the course of the dazed spiderling and crush it before the light flickered out. He had no idea how he was going to proceed if his matches gave out before he had crushed the last of the eggs and killed each one's unspeakable cargo.

10

It / 1985

Still coming.

It sensed them still coming, gaining, and Its fear grew. Perhaps It was not eternal after all — the unthinkable must finally be thought. Worse, It sensed the death of Its young. A third of these hated hateful men — boys was walking steadily up Its trail of birth, almost insane with revulsion but continuing nonetheless, methodically stamping the life from each of Its eggs.

No! It wailed, lurching from side to side, feeling Its life-force running from a hundred wounds, none of them mortal in itself, but each a song of pain, each slowing It. One of Its legs hung by a single living twist of meat. One of Its eyes was blind. It sensed a terrible rupture inside, the result of whatever poison one of the hated men-boys had managed to shoot down Its throat.

And still they came on, closing the distance, and how could this happen? It whined and mewled, and when It sensed them almost directly behind, It did the only thing It could do now: It turned to fight.