“IT had come here long after
The Turtle withdrew into its shell, here to Earth,
and IT had discovered a depth of imagination
here that was almost new, almost of concern.
This quality of imagination
made The Food very rich.
ITs teeth rent flesh gone stiff with exotic terrors
and voluptuous fears: they dreamed of nightbeasts
and moving muds; against their will
they contemplated endless gulphs.
Upon this rich Food IT existed in a simple cycle
of waking to eat and sleeping to dream.
IT had created a place in ITs own image,
and IT looked upon this place with favour
from the deadlights which were ITs eyes.
Derry was ITs killing-pen,
the people of Derry ITs sheep.
Things had gone on.
Then … these children.
Something new. For the first time in forever.
When IT had burst up into
the house on Neibolt Street,
meaning to kill them all, vaguely uneasy
that IT had not been able to do so already
(and surely that unease
had been the first new thing),
something had happened
which was totally unexpected,
utterly unthought of, and
there had been Pain, PAIN,
great ROARING Pain all through
The Shape IT had taken, and for
one moment there had also been Fear,
because the only thing IT had in common
with the stupid old Turtle and the cosmology
of The Macroverse outside the puny egg of
this universe was just this :
ALL Living Things must •abide•
by The Laws of The Shape they INHABIT.
For the first time IT realised that perhaps ITs ability to change ITs shapes might work against IT as well as for IT.
There had never •been• Pain before, there had never •been• Fear before, and for a moment IT had thought IT might die – oh ITs head had been filled with a great white silver pain, and IT had roared and mewled and bellowed and somehow the children had escaped. But now they were coming.
They had entered Its domain under The City, seven foolish children blundering through The Darkness without Lights or Weapons.
IT would kill them now, surely.
IT had made a great self-discovery :
IT did not want Change or Surprise.
IT did not want new things, ever.
IT wanted only to eat and
sleep and dream and eat again.
Following The Pain and that brief bright Fear, another new emotion had arisen (as all genuine emotions were new to It, although IT was a great •mocker• of emotions): Anger.
IT would kill the children because they had,
by some amazing accident, Hurt IT.
But IT would make them suffer first
because for one brief moment
they had made IT fear them.
Come to me then, IT thought,
listening to their approach. Come to me,
children, and see how We float down here
… how We ALL float.
And yet there was A Thought that
insinuated itself no matter how strongly
IT tried to push the thought away.
It was simply this : if all things flowed from IT
(as they surely had done since The Turtle
sicked up the universe and then fainted
inside its shell), how could any creature
of this or any other world Fool IT or Hurt IT,
no matter how briefly or triflingly?
How was that possible?
And so a last new thing had come to IT,
this not an emotion but a cold speculation :
suppose IT had not been alone,
as IT had always believed?
Suppose there was Another?
And suppose further that these children
were agents of that Other? Suppose … suppose …
IT began to tremble.
Hate was new. Hurt was new.
Being Crossed in ITs Purpose was new.
But the most terrible new thing was this Fear.
Not fear of the children, that had passed,
but the fear of not being alone. No.
There was no other. Surely there was not.
Perhaps because they were children
their imaginations had a certain raw power
IT had briefly underestimated.
But now that they were coming,
IT would let them come. They would come
and IT would cast them one by one
into The Macroverse …
into the deadlights of Its eyes.
Yes. When they got here IT would
cast them, shrieking and insane,
into the deadlights.”
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 killing 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 terrified 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 and 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 brought 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 shirt 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. Only now that they were coming, the fear had returned. They had grown up, and their imaginations had weakened – but not as much as It had believed. It had felt an ominous, upsetting growth in their power when they joined together, and It had wondered for the first time if It had perhaps made a mistake. But why be gloomy? The die was cast and not all the omens were bad. The writer was half-mad for his wife, and that was good. The writer was the strongest, the one who had somehow trained his mind for this confrontation over all the years, and when the writer was dead with his guts falling out of his body, when their precious ‘Big Bill’ was dead, the others would be Its quickly. It would feed well … and then perhaps It would go deep again. And doze. For awhile.
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