There was another hollow splash from the toilet. The Ed bumped up. It was as good an answer as any. In order to get out, of course.

In order to get out.

“Sit on that,” Jonesy told Beaver.

“Huh?”

“Sit on it!” Jonesy almost shouted it this time and Beaver sat down on the closed Ed in a hurry, looking startled. In the no-secrets, flat-toned light of the fluorescents, Beaver’s skin looked as white as freshly turned clay and every fleck of black stubble was a mole. His lips were purple. Above his head was the old joke sign: LAMAR’s THINKIN PLACE. Beav’s blue eyes were wide and terrified.

“I’m sittin, Jonesy-see?''Yeah. I’m sorry, Beav. But you just sit there, all right? Whatever he had inside him, it’s trapped. Got nowhere to go but the septic tank. I’ll be back-''Where you goin? Cause I don’t want you to leave me sittin in the shithouse next to a dead man, Jonesy. If we both run-”

“We’re not running,” Jonesy said grimly. “This is our place, and we’re not running.” Which sounded noble but left out at least one aspect of the situation: he was mostly just afraid the thing that was now in the toilet might be able to run faster than they could. Or squiggle faster. Or something. Clips from a hundred horror films-Parasite, Alien, They Came from Within-ran through his mind at super-speed. Carla wouldn’t go to the movies with him when one of those was playing, and she made him go downstairs and use the TV in his study when he brought them home on tape. But one of those movies-something he’d seen in one of them-just might save their lives. Jonesy glanced at the reddish-gold mildewy stuff growing on McCarthy’s bloody handprint. Save their lives from the thing in the toilet, anyway. The mildewy stuff… who in God’s name knew?

The thing in the bowl leaped again, thudding the underside of the lid, but Beaver had no trouble holding the lid down. That was good. Maybe whatever it was would drown in there, although Jonesy didn’t see how they could count on that; it had been living inside McCarthy, hadn’t it? It had been living inside old Mr Behold-I-stand-at-the-door-and-knock for quite some time, maybe the whole four days he’d been lost in the woods. It had slowed the growth of McCarthy’s beard, it seemed, and caused a few of his teeth to fall out; it had also caused McCarthy to pass gas that probably couldn’t have gone ignored even in the politest of polite society-farts like poison gas, to be perfectly blunt about it-but the thing itself had apparently been fine… lively… growing…

Jonesy had a sudden vivid image of a wriggling white tapeworm emerging from a pile of raw meat. His gorge rose with a liquid chugging sound.

“Jonesy?” Beaver started to get up. He looked more alarmed than ever.

“Beaver, sit back down!”

Beaver did, just in time. The thing in the toilet leaped and hit the underside of the lid with a hard, hollow rap. Behold, I stand at the door and knock.

“Remember that Lethal Weapon movie where Mel Gibson’s partner didn’t dare to get off the crapper?” Beaver said. He smiled, but his voice was dry and his eyes were terrified. “This is like that, isn’t it?”

“No,” Jonesy said, “because nothing’s going to blow up. Besides, I’m not Mel Gibson and you’re too fucking white to be Danny Glover. Listen, Beav. I’m going out to the shed-”

“Huh-uh, no way, don’t leave me here all by myself-”

“Shut up and listen. There’s friction tape out there, isn’t there?”

“Yeah, hangin on a nail, at least I think-”

“Hanging on a nail, that’s right. Near the paint-cans, I think. A big fat roll of it. I’m going to get that, then come back and tape the Ed down. Then-”

It leaped again, furiously, as if it could hear and understand. Well, how do we know it can’t? Jonesy thought. When it hit the bottom of the lid with a hard, vicious thud, the Beav winced.

“Then we’re getting out of here,” Jonesy finished.

“On the Cat?”

Jonesy nodded, although he had in fact forgotten all about the snowmobile. “Yeah, on the Cat. And we’ll hook up with Henry and Pete-'The Beav was shaking his head. “Quarantine, that’s what the guy in the helicopter said. That must be why they haven’t come back yet, don’t you think? They musta got held out by the-”

Thud!

Beaver winced. So did Jonesy.

“-by the quarantine.”

“That could be,” Jonesy said. “But listen, Beav-I’d rather be quarantined with Pete and Henry than here with… than here, wouldn’t you?”

“Let’s just flush it down,” Beaver said. “How about that?” Jonesy shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Because I saw the hole it made getting out,” Jonesy said, “and so did you. I don’t know what it is, but we’re not going to get rid of it just by pushing a handle. It’s too big.”

“Fuck.” Beaver slammed the heel of his hand against his forehead.

Jonesy nodded.

“All right, Jonesy. Go get the tape.”

In the doorway, Jonesy paused and looked back. “And Beaver…?”

The Beav raised his eyebrows.

“Sit tight, buddy-”

Beaver started to giggle. So did Jonesy. They looked at each other, Jonesy in the doorway and the Beav sitting on the closed toilet seat, snorting laughter. Then Jonesy burned across the big central room (still giggling-sit tight, the more he thought about it the funnier it seemed) toward the kitchen door. He felt hot and feverish, both horrified and hilarious. Sit tight. Jesus-Christ-Bananas.

Beav could hear Jonesy giggling all the way across the room, still giggling when he went out the door. In spite of everything, Beav was glad to hear that sound. It had already been a bad year for Jonesy, getting run over the way he had-for awhile there at first they’d all thought he was going to step out, and that was awful, poor old Jonesy wasn’t yet thirty-eight. Bad year for Pete, who’d been drinking too much, a bad year for Henry, who sometimes got a spooky absence about him that Beav didn’t understand and didn’t like… and now he guessed you could say it had been a bad year for Beaver Clarendon, as well. Of course this was only one day in three hundred and sixty-five, but you just didn’t get up in the morning thinking that by afternoon there’d be a dead guy laying naked in the tub and you’d be sitting on a closed toilet seat in order to keep something you hadn’t even seen from-

“Nope,” Beaver said. “Not going there, okay? Just not going there.”

And he didn’t have to. Jonesy would be back with the friction tape in a minute or two, three minutes tops. The question was where did he want to go until Jonesy returned? Where could he go and feel good?

Duddits, that was where. Thinking about Duddits always made him feel good. And Roberta, thinking about her was good, too. Undoubtedly.

Beav smiled, remembering the little woman in the yellow dress who’d been standing at the end of her walk on Maple Lane that day. The smile widened as he remembered how she’d caught sight of them. She had called her boy that same thing. She had called him.

“Duddits!” she cries, a little graying wren of a woman in a flowered print dress, then runs up the sidewalk toward them.

Duddits has been walking contentedly with his new friends, chattering away six licks to the minute, holding his Scooby-Doo lunchbox in his left hand and Jonesy’s hand in his right, swinging it cheerfully back and forth. His gabble seems to consist almost entirely of open vowel-sounds. The thing which amazes Beaver the most about it is how much of it he understands.

Now, catching sight of the graying birdie-woman, Duddits lets go of Jonesy’s hand and runs toward her, both of them running, and it reminds Beaver of some musical about a bunch of singers, the Von Cripps or Von Crapps or something like that. “Ah-mee, Ah-mee!” Duddits shouts exuberantly-Mommy! Mommy!