Stephen King - It

The voices and laughter were coming from beyond the junked-out cars and to the left, at the edge of the dump proper. Beverly rounded the last one, a Studebaker with its entire front end missing. Her hail of greeting died on her lips. The hand she had put up to wave did not exactly fail back to her side; it seemed to wilt.

Her first furiously embarrassed thought was: Oh dear God, why are they all naked?

This was followed by the scary realization of who they were. She froze there in front of the half-Studebaker with her shadow stapled to the heels of her low-topped sneakers. For that one moment she was totally visible to them; if any of the four had looked up from the circle they were squatting in, he could not have missed her, a girl of slightly more than medium height, a pair of skates over one shoulder, the knee of one long coltish leg still oozing blood, her mouth slack-jawed, her cheeks scarlet.

Before darting back behind the Studebaker she saw that they weren’t entirely naked after all; they had their shirts on, and their pants and underpants were simply pulled down to their shoetops, as if they had to Go Number Two (in her shock, Beverly’s mind had automatically reverted to the euphemism she had been taught as a toddler)-except whoever heard of four boys Going Number Two at the same time?

Once out of sight again, her first thought was to get away-get away fast. Her heart was pumping hard, her muscles heavy with adrenaline. She looked around, seeing what she hadn’t bothered to notice walking up here, when she had thought the voices she heard belonged to her friends. The row of junked cars on her left was really pretty thin-they were by no means packed in door to door as they would be in the week or so before the crusher came to turn them into rough blocks of twinkling metal. She had been exposed to the boys several times walking up to where she was now; if she retreated, she would be exposed again, and this time she might be seen.

Also, she felt a certain shameful curiosity: what in the world could they be doing?

Carefully, she peeked around the Studebaker.

Henry and Victor Criss were more or less facing in her direction. Patrick Hockstetter was on Henry’s left. Belch Huggins had his back to her. She observed the fact that Belch had an extremely large, extremely hairy ass, and half-hysterical giggles suddenly bubbled up her throat like the head on a glass of ginger ale. She had to clap both hands over her mouth and withdraw behind the Studebaker again, struggling to hold the giggles in.

You’ve got to get out of here, Beverly. If they catch you”

She looked back down between the junked cars, still holding her hands over her mouth. The aisle was maybe ten feet wide, littered with cans, twinkling with little jigsaw pieces of Saf-T-Glas, scruffy with weeds. If she so much as made a sound, they might hear her… particularly if their absorption in whatever strange thing they were doing flagged. When she thought of how casually she had walked up here, her blood ran cold. Also…

What in the world can they be doing?

She peeked again, seeing more of the details this time. There was a careless scatter of books and papers nearby-schoolbooks. They had just come from their summer classes, then, what most of the kids called Dummy School or Make-up School. And, because Henry and Victor were facing her way, she could see their things. They were the first things she had ever seen in her life, other than pictures in a smudgy little book that Brenda Arrowsmith had showed her the year before, and in those pictures you really couldn’t see very much. Bev observed now that their things were little tubes that hung down between their legs. Henry’s was small and hairless, but Victor’s was quite big, and there was a cloudy fuzz of fine black hair just over it.

Bill has one of those, she thought, and suddenly her whole body seemed to flush at once-heat rushed through her in a wave that made her feel giddy and faint and almost sick to her stomach. In that moment she felt much the way Ben Hanscom had felt on the last day of school, looking down at her ankle bracelet and observing the way it flashed in the sun… but he had not felt the intermixed sense of terror she felt now.

She looked behind her once more. Now the pathway between the cars leading to the shelter of the Barrens seemed much longer. She was scared to move. If they knew she had seen their things, they would probably hurt her. And not just a little, they would hurt her badly.

Belch Huggins bellowed suddenly, making her jump, and Henry yelled: “Three feet! No shit, Belch! It was three feet! Wasn’t it, Vie?”

Vie agreed it was, and they all roared with troll-like laughter.

Beverly tried another look around the junked Studebaker.

Patrick Hockstetter had turned and half-risen so that his butt was nearly in Henry’s face. In Henry’s hand was a silvery, glinting object. After a moment’s study she made it out as a lighter.

“I thought you said you felt one coming on,” Henry said.

“I do,” Patrick said. I’ll tell you when. Get ready!… Get ready, it’s coming! Get… now!”

Henry flicked the lighter. At the same moment there was the unmistakable ripping sound of a really good fart. There was no mistaking that sound; Beverly had heard it enough in her own house, usually on Saturday night, after the beans and franks. A regular bear for his beans was her father. As Patrick blew off and Henry flicked the lighter, she saw something that made her jaw drop. A bright blue jet of flame appeared to roar directly out of Patrick’s bum. To Bev it looked like the pilot-light on a gasburner.

The boys roared their troll-like laughter and Beverly withdrew behind the sheltering car, stifling mad giggles again. She was laughing, but not because she was amused. In some very weird way it was funny, yes, but mostly she was laughing because she felt a deep revulsion accompanied by a sort of horror. She was laughing because she knew of no other way to cope with what she had seen. It had something to do with seeing the boys” things, but that was by no means all or even the great part of what she felt. She had known, after all, that boys had things, the same way she knew that girls had different things; this was only what you might call a confirmed sighting. But the rest of what they were doing seemed so strange, so ludicrous and yet at the same time so deadly-primitive that she found herself, in spite of the giggling fit, groping for the core of herself with some desperation.

Stop, she thought, as if this were the answer, stop, they’ll hear you, so just you stop it, Bevvie!

But that was impossible. The best she could do was to laugh without engaging her vocal cords, so that the sounds came out of her in a series of almost inaudible chuffs, her hands pasted over her mouth, her cheeks as red as Mac apples, her eyes swimming with tears.

“Holy skit, that hurts!” Victor roared.

“Twelve feet!” Henry bellowed. “I swear to God, Vie, twelve fuckin feet! I swear it on my mother’s name!”

“I don’t care if it was twenty fuckin feet, you burned my ass off!” Victor howled, and there was more bellowing laughter; still trying to giggle silently from behind the sheltering car, Beverly thought of a movie she had seen on TV. Jon Hall had been in it. It was about this jungle tribe, they had a secret rite, and if you saw it, you got sacrificed to their god, which was this big stone idol. This did not stop her giggles, but infused them with a nearly frantic quality. They were becoming more and more like silent screams. Her belly hurt. Tears streamed down her face.

Henry, Victor, Belch, and Patrick Hockstetter ended up in the dump lighting each others” farts on that hot July afternoon because of Rena Davenport.