The Werewolfs claws descended again. Ben tried to duck under them... but suddenly he was in Its grip. It jerked him forward as if he had been no more than a ragdoll. Its jaws snapped open.
"Bastard-"
He thrust a thumb into one of Its eyes. It bellowed with pain, and one of those claw-tipped paws ripped through his shirt. Ben sucked his stomach in, but one of the claws pulled a sizzling line of pain down his chest and stomach. Blood gushed out of him and splattered on his pants, his sneakers, the floor. The Werewolf threw him into the bathtub. He thumped his head, saw stars, struggled into a sitting position, and saw his lap was full of blood.
The Werewolf whirled around. Ben observed with that same lunatic clarity that It was wearing faded Levi Strauss bluejeans. The seams had split open. A snot-caked red bandanna, the sort a train-man might carry, hung from one back pocket. Written on the back of Its silver and orange high school jacket were the words DERRY HIGH SCHOOL KILLING TEAM. Below this, the name PENNYWISE. And in the center, a number: 13.
It went for Bill again. He had gotten to his feet and now stood with his back to the wall, looking at It steadily.
"Shoot it, Beverly!" Richie screamed again.
"Beep-beep, Richie," she heard herself reply from roughly a thousand miles away. The Werewolf's head was suddenly there, in the wishbone. She covered one of its green eyes with the cup and released. There was no shake in either of her hands; she fired as smoothly and naturally as she had fired at the cans in the dump on the day they had all taken turns to see who was the best.
There was time for Ben to think Oh Beverly if you miss this time we're all dead and I don't want to die in this dirty bathtub but I can't get out. There was no miss. A round eye-not green but dead black-suddenly appeared high up in the center of Its snout: she had aimed for the right eye and missed by less than half an inch.
Its scream-an almost human scream of surprise, pain, fear and rage-was deafening. Ben's ears rang with it. Then the perfect round hole in Its snout was gone, obscured by freshets of blood. It was not flowing; it gouted from the wound in a high-pressure torrent. The freshet drenched Bill's face and hair. Doesn't matter, Ben thought hysterically. Don't worry, Bill. Nobody will be able to see it anyway when we get out of here. If we ever do.
Bill and Beverly advanced on the Werewolf, and behind them, Richie cried out hysterically: "shoot It again, Beverly! Kill it!"
"Kill It!" Mike screamed.
"That's right, kill It!" Eddie chimed in.
"Kill it!" Bill cried, his mouth drawn down in a quivering bow. There was a whitish-yellow streak of plaster dust in his hair. "Kill It, Beverly, don't let it get away!"
No ammo left, Ben thought incoherently, we're slugged out. What are you talking about, kill it? But he looked at Beverly and understood. If his heart had never been hers before that moment, it would have flown to her then. She had pulled the sling back again. Her fingers were closed over the cup, hiding its emptiness.
"Kill It!" Ben screamed, and flopped clumsily over the edge of the tub. His jeans and underwear were soaked against his skin with blood. He had no idea if he was hurt badly or not. Following the original hot sizzle there hadn't been much pain, but there sure was an awful lot of blood.
The Werewolf's greenish eyes flickered among them, now filled with uncertainty as well as pain. Blood poured down the front of Its jacket in freshets.
Bill Denbrough smiled. It was a gentle, rather lovely smile... but it did not touch his eyes. "You shouldn't have started with my brother," he said. "send the fucker to hell, Beverly."
The uncertainty left the creature's eyes-It believed. With lithe smooth grace, It turned and dove into the drain. As It went, It changed. The Derry High jacket melted into its pelt and the color ran out of both. The shape of Its skull elongated, as if it had been made of wax which was now softening and beginning to run. Its shape changed. For one instant Ben believed he had nearly seen what shape It really was, and his heart froze inside his chest, leaving him gasping.
"I'll kill you all!" a voice roared from inside the drainpipe. It was thick, savage, not in the least human. "Kill you all... kill you all... kill you all... " The words faded back and back, diminishing, washing out, growing distant... at last joining the low throbbing hum of the pumping machinery floating through the pipes.
The house seemed to settle with a heavy sub-audible thud. But it wasn't settling, Ben realized; in some strange way it was shrinking, coming back to its normal size. Whatever magic It had used to make the house at 29 Neibolt Street seem bigger was now withdrawn. The house snapped back like an elastic. It was only a house now, smelling damp and a little rotten, an unfurnished house where winos and hobos sometimes came to drink and talk and sleep out of the rain.
It was gone.
In Its wake the silence seemed very loud.
10
"W-W-We guh-got to g-g-get ow-ow-out of this p-place," Bill said. He walked over to where Ben was trying to get up and grabbed one of his outstretched hands. Beverly was standing near the drain. She looked down at herself and that coldness disappeared in a flush that seemed to turn all her skin into one warm stocking. It must have been a deep breath indeed. The dim popping sounds had been the buttons on her blouse. They were gone, every single one of them. The blouse hung open and her small breasts were clearly revealed. She snatched the blouse closed.
"Ruh-Ruh-Richie," Bill said. "Help me with B-B-Ben. He's h-h-h-"
Richie joined him, then Stan and Mike. The four of them got Ben to his feet. Eddie had gone to Beverly and put his good arm awkwardly around her shoulders. "You did great," he said, and Beverly burst into tears.
Ben took two big staggering steps to the wall and leaned against it before he could fall over again. His head felt light. Color kept washing in and out of the world. He felt decidedly pukey.
Then Bill's arm was around him, strong and comforting.
"How b-b-bad ih-ih-is it, H-H-Haystack?"
Ben forced himself to look down at his stomach. He found performing two simple actions-bending his neck and spreading apart the slit in his shirt-took more courage than he had needed to enter the house in the first place. He expected to see half his insides hanging down in front of him like grotesque udders. Instead he saw that the flow of blood had slowed to a sluggish trickle. The Werewolf had slashed him long and deep, but apparently not mortally.
Richie joined them. He looked at the cut which ran a twisting course down Ben's chest and petered out on the upper bulge of his stomach, then soberly into Ben's face. "It just about had your guts for suspenders. Haystack. You know it?"
"No fake, Jake," Ben said.
He and Richie stared at each other for a long, considering moment, and then they broke into hysterical giggles at the same instant, spraying each other with spittle. Richie took Ben into his arms and pounded his back. "We beat It, Haystack! We beat It!"
"W-W-We dih-dih-dih-didn't beat It," Bill said grimly. "We got l-l-lucky. Let's g-get out b-b-before Ih-Ih-It d-d-decides to come buh-back."
"Where?" Mike asked.
"The Buh-Buh-Barrens," Bill said.
Beverly made her way over to them, still holding her blouse closed. Her cheeks were bright red. "The clubhouse?"
Bill nodded.
"Can I have someone's shirt?" Beverly asked, blushing more furiously than ever. Bill glanced down at her, and the blood came into his own face, all in a rush. He turned his eyes away hastily, but in that instant Ben felt a rush of knowledge and dismal momentary jealousy. In that instant, that one bare second, Bill had become aware of her in a way that only Ben had himself been before.
The others had also looked and then looked away. Richie coughed against the back of his hand. Stan turned red. And Mike Hanlon dropped back a step or two as if actually frightened by the sideswell of that one small white breast, visible below her hand.
Beverly threw her head up, shaking her tangled hair back behind her. She was still blushing, but her face was lovely.
"I can't help it that I'm a girl," she said, "or that I'm starting to get big on top... now can't I please have someone's shirt?"
"Sh-sh-sure," Bill said. He pulled his white t-shirt over his head, baring his narrow chest, the visible rack of his ribs, his sunburned, freckled shoulders. "H-H-Here."
"Thank you, Bill," she said, and for one hot, smoking moment their eyes locked directly. Bill did not look away this time. His gaze was firm, adult.
"W-W-W-Welcome," he said.
Good luck, Big Bill, Ben thought, and he turned away from that gaze. It was hurting him, hurting him in a deeper place than any Vampire or Werewolf would ever be able to reach. But all the same, there was such a thing as propriety. The word he didn't know; on the concept he was very clear. Looking at them when they were looking at each other that way would be as wrong as looking at her breasts when she let go of the front of her blouse to pull Bill's t-shirt over her head. If that's the way it is. But you'll never love her the way I do. Never.
Bill's t-shirt came down almost to her knees. If not for the jeans poking out from beneath its hem, she would have looked as if she was wearing a slip.
"L-L-Let's guh-guh-go," Bill repeated. "I duh-don't nun-know about you g-guys, but I've h-h-had ee-ee-enough for wuh-wuh-one d-day."
Turned out they all had.
11
The passage of an hour found them in the clubhouse, both the window and the trapdoor open. It was cool inside, and the Barrens were blessedly silent that day. They sat without talking much, each lost in his or her own thoughts. Richie and Bev passed a Marlboro back and forth. Eddie took a brief snort from his aspirator. Mike sneezed several times and apologized. He said he was catching a cold.
"Thass the oney theeng you could catch, senhorr," Richie said, companionably enough, and that was all.
Ben kept expecting the mad interlude in the house on Neibolt Street to take on the hues of a dream. It'll recede and fall apart, he thought, the way that bad dreams do. You wake up gasping and sweating all over, but fifteen minutes later you can't remember what the dream was even about.
But that didn't happen. Everything that had happened, from the time he had forced his way in through the cellar window to the moment Bill had used the chair in the kitchen to break a window so they could get out, remained bright and clearly fixed in his memory. It had not been a dream. The clotted wound on his chest and belly was not a dream, and it didn't matter if his mom could see it or not.
At last Beverly stood up. "I have to go home," she said. "I want to change before my mom gets home. If she sees me wearing a boy's shirt, she'll kill me."
"Keel you, senhorrita," Richie agreed, "but she will keel you slow."
"Beep-beep, Richie."
Bill was looking at her gravely.
"I'll return your shirt, Bill."
He nodded and waved a hand to show that this wasn't important.
"Will you get in trouble? Coming home without it?"
"N-No. They h-h-hardly nuh-hotice when I'm a-a-around, anyway."
She nodded, bit her full underlip, a girl of eleven who was tall for her age and simply beautiful.
"What happens next, Bill?"
"I d-d-don't nuh-nuh-know."
"It's not over, is it?"
Bill shook his head.
Ben said, "It'll want us more than ever now."
"More silver slugs?" she asked him. He found he could barely stand to meet her glance. I love you, Beverly... just let me have that. You can have Bill, or the world, or whatever you need. Just let me have that, let me go on loving you, and I guess it'll be enough.
"I don't know," Ben said. "We could, but... " He trailed off vaguely, shrugged. He could not say what he felt, was somehow not able to bring it out-that this was like being in a monster movie, but it wasn't. The Mummy had looked different in some ways... ways that confirmed its essential reality. The same was true of the Werewolf-he could testify to that because he had seen it in a paralyzing close-up no film, not even one in 3-D, allowed, he had had his hands in the wiry underbrush of Its tangled pelt, he had seen a small, baleful-orange firespot (like a pompom!) in one of Its green eyes. These things were... well... they were dreams-made-real. And once dreams became real, they escaped the power of the dreamer and became their own deadly things, capable of independent action. The silver slugs had worked because the seven of them had been unified in their belief that they would. But they hadn't killed It. And next time It would approach them in a new shape, one over which silver wielded no power.
Power, power, Ben thought, looking at Beverly. It was okay now; her eyes had met Bill's again and they were looking at each other as if lost. It was only for a moment, but to Ben it seemed very long.
It always comes back to power. I love Beverly Marsh and she has power over me. She loves Bill Denbrough and so he has power over her. But-I think-he is coming to love her. Maybe it was her face, how it looked when she said she couldn't help being a girl. Maybe it was seeing one breast for just a second. Maybe just the way she looks sometimes when the light is right, or her eyes. Doesn't matter. But if he's starting to love her, she's starting to have power over him. Superman has power, except when there's Kryptonite around. Batman has power, even though he can't fly or see through walls. My mom has power over me, and her boss down in the mill has power over her. Everyone has some... except maybe for link kids and babies.
Then he thought that even little kids and babies had power; they could cry until you had to do something to shut them up.
"Ben?" Beverly asked, looking back at him. "Cat got your tongue?"
"Huh? No. I was thinking about power. The power of the slugs."
Bill was looking at him closely.
"I was wondering where that power came from," Ben said.
"Ih-Ih-It-" Bill began, and then shut his mouth. A thoughtful, vague expression drifted over his face.
"I really have to go," Beverly said. "I'll see you all, huh?"
"Sure, come on down tomorrow," Stan said. "We're going to break Eddie's other arm."
They all laughed. Eddie pretended to throw his aspirator at Stan.
"Bye, then," Beverly said, and boosted herself up and out.
Ben looked at Bill and saw that he hadn't joined in the laughter. That thoughtful expression was still on his face, and Ben knew you would have to call his name two or three times before he would answer. He knew what Bill was thinking about; he would be thinking about it himself in the days ahead. Not all the time, no. There would be clothes to hang out and take in for his mother, games of tag and guns in the Barrens, and, during a rainy spell the first four days of August, the seven of them would go on a mad Parcheesi jag at Richie Tozier's house, making blockades, sending each other back with great abandon, deliberating exactly how to split the roll of the dice while rain dripped and ran outside. His mother would announce to him that she believed Pat Nixon was the prettiest woman in America, and be horror-struck when Ben opted for Marilyn Monroe (except for the color of her hair, he thought that Bev looked like Marilyn Monroe). There would be time to eat as many Twinkies and Ring-Dings and Devil Dogs as he could get his hands on, and time to sit on the back porch reading Lucky Starr and the Moons of Mercury. There would be time for all of those things while the wound on his chest and belly healed to a scab and began to itch, because life went on and at eleven, although bright and apt, he held no real sense of perspective. He could live with what had happened in the house on Neibolt Street. The world was, after all, full of wonders.