Henry uttered a horrid rusty scream that sent birds beating up from the trees. He stood spraddle-legged for a moment, hands clasping his crotch, staring unbelievingly at Ben. 'Ug,' he said in a small voice.
'Right,' Ben said.
'Ug,' Henry said, in an even smaller voice.
'Right,' Ben said again.
Henry sank slowly back to his knees, not so much falling as folding up. He was still looking at Ben with those unbelieving black eyes.
'Ug.'
'Damn right,' Ben said.
Henry fell on his side, still clutching his testicles, and began to roll slowly from side to side.
'Ug!' Henry moaned. 'My balls. Ug! Oh you broke my balls. Ug-ug!' He was now beginning to gain a little force, and Ben started to back away a step at a time. He was sickened by what he had done, but he was also filled with a kind of righteous, paralyzed fascination. 'Ug! — my fuckin sack — ug-UG! — oh my fuckin BALLS!'
Ben might have remained in the area for an untold length of time — perhaps even until Henry recovered enough to come after him — but just then a rock struck him above the right ear with such a deep, drilling pain that, until he felt warm blood flowing again, Ben thought he had been stung by a wasp.
He turned and saw the other two striding up the middle of the stream toward him. They each had a handful of water-rounded rocks. Victor pegged one and Ben heard it whistle past his ear. He ducked and another struck his right knee, making him yell with surprised hurt. A third bounced off his right cheekbone, and that eye filled with water.
He scrambled for the far bank and climbed it as fast as he could, grabbing onto protruding roots and hauling on handfuls of bushes. He made it to the top (one final stone struck his buttocks as he pulled himself up) and took a quick look back over his shoulder.
Belch was kneeling beside Henry while Victor stood half a dozen feet away, firing stones; one the size of a baseball clipped through the man– high bushes beside Ben. He had seen enough; in fact, he had seen much more than enough. Worst of all, Henry Bowers was getting up again. Like Ben's own Timex watch, Henry could take a licking and keep on ticking. Ben turned and smashed his way into the bushes, lumbering along in a direction he hoped was west. If he could cross to the Old Cape side of the Barrens, he could beg a dime off somebody and take the bus home. And when he got there he would lock the door behind him and bury these tattered bloody clothes in the trash and this crazy dream would finally be over. Ben thought of himself sitting in his chair in the living room, freshly tubbed, wearing his fuzzy red bathrobe, watching Daffy Duck cartoons on The Mighty Ninety and drinking milk through a strawberry Flav-R-Straw. Hold that thought, he told himself grimly, and kept lumbering along.
Bushes sprang into his face. Ben pushed them aside. Thorns reached and clawed. He tried to ignore them. He came to a flat area of ground that was black and mucky. A thick stand of bamboo-like growth spread across it and a fetid smell rose from the earth. An ominous thought
(quicksand)
slipped across the foreground of his mind like a shadow as he looked at the sheen of standing water deeper into the grove of bamboo-stuff. He didn't want to go in there. Even if it wasn't quicksand, the mud would suck his sneakers off. He turned right instead, running along the front of the bamboo-grove and finally into a patch of real woods.
The trees, mostly firs, were thick, growing everywhere, battling each other for a little space and sun, but there was less undergrowth and he could move faster. He was no longer sure what direction he was moving in, but still thought he was, on measure, a little ahead of the game. The Barrens were enclosed by Derry on three sides and bounded by the half-finished turnpike extension on the fourth. Sooner or later he would come out somewhere.
His stomach throbbed painfully, and he pulled up the remains of his sweatshirt for a look. He winced and drew a whistle of air in over his teeth. His belly looked like a grotesque Christmas-tree ball, all caked red blood and smeared green from his slide down the
embankment. He pulled the sweatshirt down again. Looking at that mess made him feel like blowing lunch.
Now he heard a low humming noise from ahead — it was one steady note just above the low range of his hearing. An adult, intent only on getting the hell out of there (the mosquitoes had found Ben now, and while nowhere near as big as sparrows, they were pretty big), would have ignored it, or simply not heard it at all. But Ben was a boy, and he was already getting over his fright. He swerved to his left and pushed through some low laurel bushes. Beyond them, sticking out of the ground, were the top three feet of a cement cylinder about four feet wide. It was capped with a vented iron manhole cover. The cover was stamped with the words DERRYSEWERDEFT . The sound — this close it was more a drone than a hum — was coming from someplace deep inside.
Ben put one eye to a venthole but could see nothing. He could hear that drone, and water running down there someplace, but that was all. He took a breath, got a whiff of a sour smell that was both dank and shitty, and drew back with a wince. It was a sewer, that was all. Or maybe a combined sewer and drainage-tunnel — there were plenty of those in flood-conscious Derry. No big deal. But it had given him a funny sort of chill. Part of it was seeing the handiwork of man in all this overgrown jumble of wilderness, but he supposed part of it was the shape of the thing itself — that concrete cylinder jutting out of the ground. Ben had read H. G. Wells's The Time Machine the year before, first the Classics Comics version and then the whole book. This cylinder with its vented iron cap reminded him of the wells which lead down into the country of the slumped and horrible Morlocks.
He moved away from it quickly, trying to find west again. He got to a link clearing and turned until his shadow was as directly behind him as he could get it. Then he headed off in a straight line.
Five minutes later he heard more running water ahead, and voices. Kids' voices.
He stopped to listen, and that was when he heard snapping branches and other voices behind him. They were perfectly recognizable. They belonged to Victor, Belch, and the one and only Henry Bowers.
The nightmare was not over yet, it seemed.
Ben looked around for a place to go to earth.
10
He came out of his hiding place about two hours later, dirtier than ever, but a little refreshed. Incredible as it seemed to him, he had dozed off.
When he had heard the three of them behind him, coming after him still, Ben had come dangerously close to freezing up completely, like an animal caught in the headlamps of an oncoming truck. A paralytic drowsiness began to steal over him. The idea of simply lying down, curling up into a ball like a hedgehog, and letting them do whatever they felt they had to occurred to him. It was a crazy idea, but it also seemed like a strangely good idea.
But instead Ben began to move toward the sound of the running water and those other kids. He tried to untangle their voices and get the sense of what they were saying — anything to shake off that scary paralysis of the spirit. Some project. They were talking about some project. One or two of the voices were even a little familiar. There was a splash, followed by a burst of good-natured laughter. The laughter filled Ben with a kind of stupid longing, and made him more aware of his dangerous position than anything else had done.
If he was going to be caught, there was no need to let these kids in for a dose of his medicine. Ben turned right again. Like many large people, he was remarkably light-footed. He passed close enough to the boys to see their shadows moving back and forth between him
and the bright water, bu t they neither saw him nor heard him. Gradually their voices began to fall behind.