It

His stomach cramped painfully. He was not a stupid boy, and he understood this came close to completely confirming Eddie’s story. Splinters of glass on the moldering leaves under the porch meant tha t the window had been broken from inside. From the cellar.
‘Wh-what?’ Bill asked again, looking up at Richie. His face was grim and white. Looking at that set face, Richie mentally threw in the towel.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘You cuh-cuh-homing?’
‘Yeah.’
They crawled under the porch.
The smell of decaying leaves was a smell Richie usually liked, but there was nothing pleasant about the smell under here. The leaves felt spongy under his hands and knees, and he had an impression that they might go down for two or three feet. He suddenly wondered what he would do if a hand or a claw sprang out of those leaves and seized him.
Bill was examining the broken window. Glass had sprayed everywhere. The wooden strip which had been between the panes lay in two splintered pieces under the porch steps. The top of the window frame jutted out like a broken bone.
‘Something hit that fucker wicked hard,’ Richie breathed. Bill, now peering inside — or trying to — nodded.
Richie elbowed him aside enough so he could look, too. The basement was a dim litter of crates and boxes. The floor was earth and, like the leaves, it gave off a damp and humid aroma. A furnace bulked to the left, thrusting round pipes at the low ceiling. Beyond it, at the end of the cellar, Richie could see a large stall with wooden sides. A horse stall was his first thought, but who kept horses in the jeezly cellar? Then he realized that in a house as old as this one, the furnace must have burned coal instead of oil. Nobody had bothered to convert the furnace because no one wanted the house. That thing with the sides was a coalbin. To the far right, Richie could make out a flight of stairs going up to ground level.
Now Bill was sitting down . . . hunching himself forward . . . and before Richie could actually believe what he was up to, his friend’s legs were disappear ing into the window.
‘Bill!’ he hissed. ‘Chrissake, what are you doing? Get outta there!’
Bill didn’t reply. He slithered through, scraping his duffel coat up from the small of his back, barely missing a chunk of glass that would have cut him a good one. A second later Richie heard his tennies smack down on the hard earth inside.
‘Piss on this action,’ Richie muttered frantically to himself, looking at the square of darkness into which his friend had disappeared. ‘Bill, you gone out of your mind?
Bill’s voice floated up: ‘Y-You c-c-can stay up th-there if you w-want, Ruh-Ruh-Richie. S t-Stand g-g-guard.’
Instead he rolled over on his belly and shoved his legs through the cellar window before his nerve could go bad on him, hoping he wouldn’t cut his hands or his stomach on the broken glass.
Something clutched his legs. Richie screamed.
‘I-I-It’s juh-juh –hust m-me,’ Bill hissed, and a moment later Richie was standing beside him in the cellar, pulling down his shirt and his jacket. ‘Wh-who d-did you th-think it w –was?’
‘The boogeyman,’ Richie said, and laughed shakily.
‘Y-You g-go th-that w-way and I-I — I’ll g-g-g — ‘
‘Fuck that,’ Richie said. He could actually hear his heartbeat in his voice, making it sound bumpy and uneven, first up and then down. ‘I’m stickin with you, Big Bill.’
They moved toward the coalpit first, Bill slightly in the lead, the gun in his hand, Richie close behind him, trying to look everywhere at once. Bill stood beyond one of the coalpit’s jutting wooden sides for a moment, and then suddenly darted around it, pointing the gun with both hands. Richie squinched his eyes shut, steeling himself for the explosion. It didn’t come. He opened his eyes again cautiously.
‘Nuh-nuh –nothin but c-c-coal,’ Bill said, and giggled nervously.
Richie stepped up beside Bill and looked. There was still a drift of old coal piled up almost to the ceiling at the back of th e stall and trickling away to a lump or two by their feet. It was as black as a crow’s wing.
‘Let’s — ‘ Richie began, and then the door at the head of the cellar stairs crashed open against the wall with a violent bang, spilling thin white daylight down the stairs.
Both boys screamed.
Richie heard snarling sounds. They were very loud — the sounds a wild animal in a cage might make. He saw loafers descend the steps. Faded jeans on top of them — swinging hands –
But they weren’t hands . . . they were paws. Huge, misshapen paws.
‘Cuh-cuh-climb the c-c-coal!’ Bill was screaming, but Richie stood frozen, suddenly knowing what was coming for them, what was going to