Ben drew back, aware that the others were doing the same, crowding behind Bill like frightened quail. It was a bedroom, empty save for one stained mattress. The rusty ghosts of the coils in a box-spring long departed were tattooed into the mattress's yellow hide. Outside the room's one window, sunflowers dipped and nodded.

'There's nothing — ' Bill began, and then the mattress began to bulge in and out rhythmically. It suddenly ripped straight down the middle. A black sticky fluid began to spill out, staining the mattress and then running over the floor toward the doorway. It came in long ropy tendrils.

'Shut it, Bill!' Richie shouted. 'Shut the fuckin door!'

Bill slammed it shut, looked around at them, and nodded. 'Come on.' He had barely touched the knob of the second door — this one on the other side of the narrow hall — when the buzzing scream began behind the cheap wood.

9

Even Bill drew back from that rising, inhuman cry. Ben felt the sound might drive him mad; his mind visualized a giant cricket behind the door, like something from a movie where radiation made all the bugs get big — The Beginning of the End, maybe, or The Black Scorpion, or that one about the ants in the Lo s Angeles stormdrains. He could not have run even if that buzzing rugose horror had splintered the panels of the door and begun caressing him with its great hairy legs. Beside him, he was dimly aware that Eddie was breathing in hacking gasps.

The scream rose in pitch, never losing that buzzing, insectile quality. Bill fell back another step, no blood in his face now, his eyes bulging, his lips only a purple scar below his nose.

'Shoot it, Beverly!' Ben heard himself cry. 'Shoot it through the door, shoot it before it can get us!' And the sun fell through the dirty window at the end of the hall, a heavy feverish weight.

Beverly raised the Bullseye like a girl in a dream as the buzzing scream rose louder, louder, louder —

But before she could pull the sling back, Mike was shouting: 'No! No! Don't, Bev! Oh gosh! I'll be dipped!' And incredibly, Mike was laughing. He pushed forward, grabbed the knob, turned it, and shoved the door open. It came free of the swollen jamb with a brief grinding nois e. 'It's a mooseblower! Just a mooseblower, that's all, something to scare the crows!'

The room was an empty box. Lying on the floor was a Sterno can with both ends cut off. In the middle, strung tight and knotted outside holes punched in the can's sides, was a waxed length of string. Although there was no breeze in the room — the one window was shut and indifferently boarded over, letting light pass only in chinks and rays — there could be no doubt that the buzzing was coming from the can.

Mike walked to it and fetched it a solid kick. The buzzing stopped as the can tumbled into a far corner.

'Just a mooseblower,' he said to the others, as if apologizing. 'We put cm on the scarecrows. It's nothing. Only a cheap trick. But I ain't a crow.' He looked at Bill, not laughing anymore but smiling still. 'I'm still scared of It — I guess we all are — but It's scared of us, too. Tell you the truth, I think It's scared pretty bad.'

Bill nodded. 'I-I do, too,' he said.

They went down to the door at the end of the hall, and as Ben watched Bill hook his finger into the hole where the doorknob's shaft had been, he understood that this was where it was going to end; there would be no trick behind this door. The smell was worse now, and that thundery feeling of two opposing powers swirling around them was much stronger. He glanced at Eddie, one arm in a sling, his good hand clutching his aspirator. He looked at Bev on his other side, white-faced, holding the slingshot up like a wishbone. He thought: If wehave to run, I'll try to protect you, Beverly. I swear I'll try.

She might have heard his thought, because she turned toward him and offered him a strained smile. Ben smiled back.

Bill pulled the door open. Its hinges uttered a dull scream and then were silent. It was a bathroom . . . but something was wrong with it. Someone broke something in here was all that Ben could make out at first. Not a booze bottle . . . what?

White chips and shards, glimmering wickedly, lay strewn everywhere. Then he understood. It was the crowning insanity. He laughed. Richie joined him.

'Somebody must have let the granddaddy of all farts,' Eddie said, and Mike began to giggle and nod his head. Stan was smiling a little. Only Bill and Beverly remained grim.

The white pieces littered across the floor were shards of porcelain. The toilet-bowl had exploded. The tank stood drunkenly at an angle in a puddle of water, saved from falling over by the fact that the toilet had been placed in one corner of the room and th e tank had landed kitty-corner.

They crowded in behind Bill and Beverly, their feet gritting on bits of porcelain. Whatever it was, Ben thought, it blew that poor toilet right to hell. He had a vision of Henry Bowers dropping two or three of his M-80s into it, slamming the lid down, then bugging out in a hurry. He couldn't think of anything else short of dynamite that would have done such a cataclysmic job. There were a few chunks, but damned few; most of what was left were wicked-looking slivers like blowgun darts. The wallpaper (rose-runners and capering elves, as in the hall) was peppered with holes all the way around the room. It looked like shotgun blasts but Ben knew it was more porcelain, driven into the walls by the force of the explosion.

There was a bathtub standing on claw feet with generations of grimy toe-jam between each blunt talon. Ben peeked into it and saw a tidal-flat of silt and grit on the bottom. A rusty showerhead glared down from above. There was a basin and a medicine cabinet standing ajar above it, disclosing empty shelves. There were small rust-rings on these shelves, where bottles had once stood.

'I wouldn't get too close to that, big Bill!' Richie said sharply, and Ben looked around.

Bill was approaching the mouth of the drainhole in the floor, over which the toilet had once sat. He leaned toward it . . . and then turned back to the others.

'I can h-h-hear the pub-pumping muh-muh-machinery . . . just like in the Buh-Buh-harrens!'

Bev drew closer to Bill. Ben followed her, and yes, he could hear it; that steady thrumming noise. Except, echoing up through the pipes, it didn't sound like machinery at all. It sounded like something alive.

T h –T h – This is w-w-where It cuh-cuh – hame fr –from,' Bill said. His face was still deadly pale, but his eyes were alight with excitement. 'This is w-where it cuh-hame from that d-d-day, and th-hat's w-w-where it a-a-always comes fr –rom! The druh-druh-drains!'

Richie was nodding. 'We were in the cellar, but that isn't where It was — It came down the stairs. Because this is where It could get out.'

'And It did this? ' Beverly asked.

'Ih-It was in a h-h-hurry, I th-think,' Bill said gravely.

Ben looked into the pipe. It was about three feet in diameter and dark as a mineshaft. The inner ceramic surface of the pipe was crusted with stuff he didn't want to know about. That thrumming sound floated up hypnotically . . . and suddenly he saw something. He did not see it with his physical eyes, not at first, but with one buried deep in his mind.

It was rushing toward them, moving at express-train speed, filling the throat of this dark pipe from side to side; It was in Its own form now, whatever that might be; It would take some shape from their minds when It got here. It was coming, coming up from Its own foul runs and black catacombs under the earth, Its eyes glowing a feral yellowish green, coming, coming; It was coming.

And then, at first like sparks, he saw Its eyes down in that darkness. They took shape — flaring and malignant. Over the thrumming sound of the machinery, Ben could now hear a new noise — Whoooooooo . . . A fetid smell belched from the ragged mouth of the drain-pipe and he fell back, coughing and gagging.