Stephen King - It

But the blood pouring from the smashed leeches seemed real enough, the sound of their buzzing wings seemed real enough… and his own terror seemed real enough.

One of them fell down inside his shirt and settled on his chest. While he was beating frantically at it and watching the bloodstain spread above the place where it had taken its hold, another settled on his right eye. Patrick closed it, but that did no good; he felt a brief hot flare as the thing’s sucker poked through his eyelid and began to suck the fluid out of his eyeball. Patrick felt his eye collapse in its socket and he screamed again. A leech flew into his mouth when he did and roosted on his tongue.

It was all almost painless.

Patrick went staggering and flapping up the path toward the junked cars. Parasites hung all over him. Some of them drank to capacity and then burst like balloons; when this happened to the bigger ones, they drenched Patrick with almost half a pint of his own hot blood. He could feel the leech inside his mouth swelling up and he opened his jaws because the only coherent thought he had left was that it must not burst in there; it must not, must not.

But it did. Patrick ejected a huge spray of blood and parasite-flesh like vomit. He fell down in the gravelly dirt and began to roll over and over, still screaming. Little by little the sound of his own screams began to seem faint, faraway.

Just before he passed out, he saw a figure step from behind the last of the junked cars. At first Patrick thought he was a guy, Mandy Fazio perhaps, and he would be saved. But as the figure drew closer, he saw its face was running like wax. Sometimes it began to harden and look like something-or someone-and then it would start to run again, as if it couldn’t make up its mind who or what it wanted to be.

“Hello and goodbye,” a bubbling voice said from inside the running tallow of its features, and Patrick tried to scream again. He didn’t want to die; as the only “real” person, he wasn’t supposed to die. If he did, everyone else in the world would die with him.

The manshape laid hold of his leech-encrusted arms and began to drag him away toward the Barrens. His bloodstained book-carrier bumped and thumped along beside him, its strap still twisted about his neck. Patrick, still trying to scream, lost consciousness.

He awoke only once: when, in some dark, smelly, drippy hell where no light shone, no light at all, It began to feed.

At first Beverly was not entirely sure what she was seeing or what was happening… only that Patrick Hockstetter had begun to thrash and dance and scream. She got up warily, holding the slingshot in one hand and two of the ball-bearings in the other. She could hear Patrick blundering off down the path, still yelling his head off. In that moment, Beverly looked every inch the lovely woman she was going to become, and if Ben Hanscom had been around to see her just then, his heart might not have been able to stand it.

She was standing fully upright, her head cocked to the left, her eyes wide, her hair done in braids that had been tied off with two small red velvet bows which she had bought in Dahlie’s for a dime. Her posture was one of total attention and concentration; it was feline, lynxlike. She had shifted forward on her left foot, her body half-turned as if to go after Patrick, and the legs of her faded shorts had pulled up enough to show the edging on her yellow cotton panties. Below them, her legs were already smoothly muscled, beautiful in spite of the scabs, bruises, and smutches of dirt.

It’s a trick. He saw you and he knows he probably can’t catch you in a fair chase, so he’s trying to get you to come out. Don’t go, Bevvie.”

But another part of her thought there was too much pain and fear in those screams. She wished she had seen whatever had happened to Patrick-if anything had-more clearly. She wished more than anything else that she had come into the Barrens a different way and missed the whole crazy shenanigans.

Patrick’s screams stopped. A moment later Beverly heard someone speak-but she knew that had to be her imagination. She heard her father say, “Hello and goodbye.” Her father wasn’t even in Derry that day: he had set off for Brunswick at eight o’clock. He and Joe Tammerly were going to pick up a Chevy truck in Brunswick. She shook her head as if to clear it. The voice didn’t speak again. Her imagination, obviously.

She walked out of the bushes to the path, ready to run the instant she saw Patrick charging at her, her reactions on triggers as delicate as a cat’s whiskers. She looked down at the path and her eyes widened. There was blood here. Quite a lot of it.

Fake blood, her mind insisted. You can buy a bottle of it at Dahlie’s for forty-nine cents. Be careful, Bevvie!

She knelt and quickly touched the blood with her fingers. She looked at them closely. It wasn’t fake blood.

There was a flash of heat in her left arm, just below the elbow. She looked down and saw something that she first thought was some kind of burr. No-not a burr. Burrs didn’t twitch and flutter. This thing was alive. A moment after that she realized it was biting her. She struck it hard with the back of her right hand and it spattered, spraying blood. She backed up a step, getting ready to scream now that it was over… and then she saw that it wasn’t over at all. The thing’s featureless head was still on her arm, its snout buried in her flesh.

With a shrill cry of disgust and fear, she picked it off and saw its proboscis come out of her arm like a small dagger, dripping with blood. She understood the blood on the path now, oh yes, and her eyes went to the refrigerator.

The door had swung closed and latched again, but a number of the parasites had been left outside and were crawling sluggishly over the rusty-white porcelain. As Beverly looked, one of them unfurled its membranous fly-like wings and buzzed toward her.

She acted without thinking, loading one of the steel ball-bearings into the cup of the Bullseye and pulling the sling back. As the muscles of her left arm flexed smoothly, she saw loose blood squirt from the hole the thing had made in her arm. She let fly anyway, unconsciously leading the flying thing.

Shit! Missed! she thought as the Bullseye snapped and the ball-bearing flew, a glittering chunk of light in the hazy sun. And she would later tell the other Losers that she knew she had missed it, the same way a bowler knows he has missed the strike as soon as a bad ball leaves his hand. But then she saw the ball-bearing curve. It happened in a split-second, but the impression was very clear: it had curved. It struck the flying thing and splattered it to mush. There was a shower of yellowish droplets which pattered on the path.

Beverly backed up slowly at first, her eyes huge, her lips trembling, her face a shocked grayish-white. Her gaze was pinned to the front of the discarded refrigerator, waiting to see if any of the other things would smell or sense her. But the parasites only crawled slowly back and forth, like autumn flies drugged with the cold.

At last she turned and ran.

Panic beat darkly against her thoughts, but she would not give in to it entirely. She held the Bullseye in her left hand and looked back over her shoulder from time to time. There was still blood dappled brightly on the path and on the leaves of some of the bushes bordering it, as if Patrick had woven from side to side as he ran.

Beverly burst out into the area of the junked cars again. Ahead of her there was a bigger splash of blood, just beginning to soak into the gravelly earth. The ground looked disturbed, darker streaks of earth lined into the powdery-white surface. As if there had been a struggle there. Two grooves, about two and a half feet apart, led away from this spot.