The squirt guns in his waistband were leaking, making him feel like a damned fool. It was one thing to fight monsters, he thought. Quite another to fight them with wet underwear. He pulled the worst offender from his belt and clamped it in his teeth; better a dribbly chin than to look like you needed diapers.

The tunnel turned right again, began dropping steeply. Mike inched ahead, using his elbows as brakes, the flashlight beam bobbing against the red roof. Mike kept crawling.

He felt it coming before he saw it.

The earth began to tremble slightly. Mike remembered one long-ago summer night when he and Dale had been watching . a ballgame over at Oak Hill and had gone for a moonlit walk along the railroad tracks. They'd felt a vibration in the soles of their sneakers and then put their ears against the rails, feeling the distant coming of the daily express between Gales-burg and Peoria.

This was like that. Only much stronger, the vibration coming up through the bones of Mike's hands and knees and shaking his spine, rattling his teeth. And with the tremors came the stench.

Mike deliberated about turning the light off and then decided to hell with it-these things could certainly see him, Why not return the favor. He lay prone, the flashlight under his chin now, Memo's squirrel gun in his right hand, the squirt gun in his left. Then he remembered that he'd have to reload and he hurried to fumble out four more cartridges, wrapping them in the short sleeve of his t-shirt where he could get them in a hurry.

For a second the vibration seemed all around him, above him, behind him, and he had a moment of pure panic as he thought of the thing exploding on him from behind, seizing him from the rear before he managed to squirm around, get the gun aimed behind him. Mike felt the panic rise like dark bile, but then the vibrations localized and intensified. It's ahead of me.

He lay flat, waiting.

The thing came around a bend in the tunnel perhaps twelve feet ahead of him. It was worse than Mike could have imagined.

For a second he almost let his bladder go, but controlling that helped him to control his thinking. It's not so bad, it's not so bad.

It was.

It was the eel that Mike had caught and run from in a small boat, and a lamprey with its all-devouring mouth and endless rows of teeth disappearing into the gut that was its body, and it was a worm the size of a large sewer pipe, with quivering appendages that might have been a thousand tiny fingers ringing the mouth, or perhaps waving tendrils, or perhaps serrated lips . . . Mike didn't give too much of a damn at that second.

The flashlight illuminated gray and pink flesh, pulsing blood vessels visible through the skin. No eyes. Teeth. More teeth. Pink gut not so dissimilar from the tunnel itself.

The thing paused, tendril lips writhed, the lamprey mouth pulsated, and it came on at a terrific speed.

Mike fired the squirt gun first-Holy Mary, Mother of God-saw the water arch the ten feet, saw the pink flesh hiss, realized that the thing was too big to be destroyed or seriously inconvenienced by holy water or acid, saw it still rushing on, knew that he could never back away in time, and he fired the squirrel gun.

The blast deafened and blinded him.

He broke the breech, flipped out the empty, took a shell from his sleeve, slammed it home, clicked the breech shut.

He fired again, blinking away retinal echoes.

The thing had stopped ... it had to have stopped . . . he'd have been in its gut already if it hadn't stopped. The flashlight was askew. Mike reloaded, aimed, steadied the flashlight with his left hand.

It had stopped. Less than eight feet away. The circular jaw of the thing had been shattered in several places. Pieces of the tunnel dribbled onto it. Greenish-gray fluid leaked from the giant worm body.

It seemed more bemused than hurt, more curious than frightened.

"Fuck you!" screamed Mike between Hail Marys. He fired again. Reloaded. Thrust the squirrel gun another yard closer by wiggling forward and fired again. He had at least ten shells left. He wiggled and flopped to get some out of his right side pocket.

The lamprey thing withdrew around the bend in the tunnel.

Still screaming, only partially coherent, flailing on raw elbows and knees, Mike followed it as quickly as he could.

"Where are we?" whispered Dale.

They had come out of the boiler room into a narrow hall, followed it left around several corners, come into a wider corridor, and now were in a narrow one again. Giant pipes ran overhead. The basement hallways were littered with stacked school desks, empty cardboard drums, shattered chalkboards. And cobwebs. Many, many cobwebs.

"I don't know where we are," Harlen whispered back. Both boys had their flashlights on. The beams flickered from surface to surface like demented insects. "This west end of the basement was Van Syke's area. None of us came in here."

That was true enough. The hallway was narrow, the ceiling low, there were many small doors and access panels on the slanted concrete and stone walls. The pipes dripped moisture. Dale thought that the place was a maze, that they'd never find their way to the halls he knew from years of going to the basement restrooms. The stairway to the basement was below the central stairways.

They came around another turn. Dale's thumb had been tense on the hammer of the over-and-under for long minutes, even though it had been locked back. He was sure he was going to blow his own leg off any second. Both of Harlen's arms were straight out--the flashlight in the hand below the cast, the .38 revolver in the other hand. Harlen was moving like a jerky weathervane in a strong wind.

The basement of Old Central was not silent. Dale heard creakings, slidings, raspings-the pipes carried hollow echoes and reverberating moans, as if some huge mouth was breathing into them from above-while the thick stone walls seemed to be expanding and contracting slightly, as if something large was pressing and relaxing pressure from the opposite side.

Dale came around another corner, swinging the light in fast arcs, the Savage raised to his shoulder despite the ache in his right arm.

"Holy shit," Harlen whispered reverently as he came around behind him.

They were in the main basement corridor now. Dale recognized it from years of coming down to the restroom, marching down to the music and art rooms at the far end of this long hall. The stairways-one for coming down, one for going up-were another twenty yards along this corridor. Maybe.

The pipes dripped moist gray stalactites now. The walls were covered with what looked like a thin film of greenish oil. There were mounds of gray matter in the hall-like unformed stalagmites or giant, melted candles.

But that wasn't what had caused Harlen's comment: the walls were perforated with holes-some a foot and a half or so across, others opening from floor to ceiling. Tunnels ran off from the central corridor and disappeared into the soil and rock of the playground. A faint phosphorescence came from these tunnels; Dale and Harlen could have switched off their flashlights and still seen quite clearly in this windowless place.

They did not switch off their flashlights.

"Look," said Harlen. He pushed back a door that had the single word boy's stenciled on it. Inside what had been their restroom, the metal stalls had been ripped out of their mountings and twisted like thin tin. The toilets and urinals had been torn from their mountings and pushed almost to the ceiling, trailing torn pipes and dangling fittings.

The long room was almost filled with the gray stalactites, mounds of softly pulsating greenish wax, strands of something that looked like a spiderweb made of hairless flesh. The round hole in the wall to their left was at least eight feet across. Dale smelled the odor of wet earth and decay wafting out of it. There were a dozen other tunnels, some in the floor and ceiling.