It

I saw the water coming out of that feeder-pipe! Saw it!

'H-H-Hey!' he shouted. 'Can y-y-you guys see a-any thing?'

'It's been getting lighter for the last fifteen minutes or so!' Beverly shouted back. 'Whereare we, Bill? Do you know?'

I thought I did, Bill almost said. 'No! Come on!'

He had believed they must be approaching the concrete-channelled section of the Kenduskeag that was called the Canal . . . the part that went under downtown and came out in Bassey Park. But there was light down here, light, and surely there could be no light in the Canal under the city. But it brightened steadily just the same.

Bill was beginning to have serious problems with Audra. It wasn't the current — that had slackened — it was the depth. Pretty soon I'll be floating her, he thought. He could see Ben on his left and Beverly on his right; by turning his head slightly, he could see Richie behind Ben. The footing was getting decidedly odd. The bottom of the tunnel was now heaped and mounded with detritus — bricks, it felt like. And up ahead, something was sticking out of the water like, the prow of a ship that is in the process of sinking.

Ben floundered toward it, shivering in the cold water. A soggy cigar box floated into his face. He pushed it aside and grabbed at the thing sticking out of the water. His eyes widened. It appeared to be a large sign. He was able to read the letters AL, and below that, FUT. And suddenly he knew.

'Bill! Richie! Bev!' He was laughing with astonishment.

'What is it, Ben?' Beverly shouted.

Grabbing it with both hands, Ben rocked it back. There was a grating sound as one side of the sign scraped along the wall of the tunnel. Now they could read: ALADDI, and, below that, BACK TO THE FUTURE.

'It's the marquee for the Aladdin,' Richie said. 'How — '

'The street caved in,' Bill whispered. His eyes were widening. He stared up the tunnel. The light was brighter still up ahead.

'What, Bill?'

'What the fuck happened?

'Bill? Bill? What — '

'All these drains!' Bill said wildly. 'All these old drains! There's been another flood! And I think this time — '

He began to flounder ahead again, holding Audra up. Ben, Bev, and Richie fell in behind him. Five minutes later Bill looked up and saw blue sky. He was looking through a crack in the ceiling of the tunnel, a crack that widened to better than seventy feet across as it ran away from where he stood. The water was broken by many islands and archipelagos up ahead — piles of bricks, the back deck of a Plymouth sedan with its trunk sprung open and pouring water, a parking-meter leaning against the tunnel wall at a drunken slant, its red VIOLATION flag up.

The footing had become almost impossible now — m i n i –mountains that rose and fell with no rhyme or reason, inviting a broken ankle. The water ran mildly around their armpits.

Mild now, Bill thought. But if we'd been here two hours ago, even one, I think we might have gotten the ride of our lives.

'What the fuck is this, Big Bill?' Richie asked. He was standing at Bill's left elbow, his face soft with wonder as he looked up at the rip in the roof of the tunnel — except it's not the roofof any tunnel Bill thought. It's Main Street. At least it used to be.

'I think most of downtown Derry is now in the Canal and being carried down the Kenduskeag River. Pretty soon it'll be in the Penobscot and then it will be in the Atlantic Ocean and good fucking riddance. Can you help me with Audra, Richie? I don't think I can — '

'Sure,' Richie said. 'Sure, Bill. No sweat.'

He took Audra from Bill. In this light, Bill could see her better than he perhaps wanted to –her pallor masked but not hidden by the dirt and ordure that smeared her forehead and caked her cheeks. Her eyes were still wide open . . . wide open and innocent of all sense. Her hair hung lank and wet. She might as well have been one of those inflatable doilies they sold at the Pleasure Chest in New York or along the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. The only difference was her slow, steady respiration . . . and that might have been a clockwork trick, no more than that.

'How are we going to get up from here?' he asked Richie.

'Get Ben to give you ten fingers,' Richie said. 'You can yank Bev up, and the two of you can get your wife. Ben can boost me and we'll get Ben. And after that I'll show you how to set up a volleyball tournament for a thousand sorority girls.'

'Beep-beep, Richie.'

'Beep-beep your ass, Big Bill.'

The tiredness was going through him in steady waves. He caught Beverly's level gaze and held it for a moment. She nodded to him slightly, and he made a smile for her.

'Give me ten fingers, B-B-Ben?'

Ben, who also looked unutterably weary, nodded. A deep scratch ran down one cheek. 'I think I can handle that.'

He stooped slightly and laced his hands together. Bill hiked one foot, stepped into Ben's hand, and jumped up. It wasn't quite enough. Ben lifted the step he had made with his hands and Bill grabbed the edge of the broken– in tunnel roof. He yanked himself up. The first thing he saw was a white-and –orange crash barrier. The second thing was a crowd of milling men and women beyond the barrier. The third was Freese's Department Store — only it had an oddly bulged-out, foreshortened look. It took him a moment to realize that almost half of

Freese's had sunk into the street and the Canal beneath. The top half had slued out over the street and seemed in danger of toppling over like a pile of badly stacked books.

'Look! Look! There's someone in the street!'

A woman was pointing toward the place where Bill's head had poked out of the crevasse in the shattered pavement.

'Praise God, there's someone else!'

She started forward, an elderly woman with a kerchief tied over her head peasant-style. A cop held her back. 'Not safe out there, Mrs Nelson. You know it. Rest of the street might go any time.'

Mrs Nelson, Bill thought. I remember you. Your sister used to sit George and me sometimes. He raised his hand to show her he was all right, and when she raised her own hand in return, he felt a sudden surge of good feelings — and hope.

He turned around and lay flat on the sagging pavement, trying to distribute his weight as evenly as possible, the way you were supposed to do on thin ice. He reached down for Bev. She grasped his wrists and, with what seemed to be the last of his strength, he pulled her up. Th e sun, which had disappeared again, now ran out from behind a brace of mackerel-scale clouds and gave them their shadows back. Beverly looked up, startled, caught Bill's eyes, and smiled.

'I love you, Bill,' she said. 'And I pray she'll be all right.'

'Thuh-hank you, Bevvie,' he said, and his kind smile made her start to cry a little. He hugged her and the small crowd gathered behind the crash barrier applauded. A photographer from the Derry News snapped a picture. It appeared in the June 1st edition of the paper, which was printed in Bangor because of water damage to the News's presses. The caption was simple enough, and true enough for Bill to cut the picture out and keep it tucked away in his wallet for years to come: SURVIVORS, the caption read. That was all, but that was enough.

It was six minutes of eleven in Derry, Maine.