It

to run. The door behind him swept shut with a muffled bang. He screamed . . . and something seemed to sweep through the air just behind him, ruffling his shirt. He looked back but there was nothing there. That did not change his belief, however, that something had been.
He caught up with the others. He was panting, out of breath, and would have sworn he had run half a mile at least . . . but when he looked back, the parlor’s far wall was not ten feet away.
Mike grasped his shoulder hard enough to hurt.
‘You scared me, man,’ he said. Richie, Stan, and Eddie were looking at Mike questioningly. ‘He looked small,’ Mike said. ‘Like he was a mile away.’
‘Bill!’
Bill looked back.
‘We gotta make sure everybody stays close,’ Ben panted. ‘This place . . . it’s like the funhouse in a carnival, or something. We’ll get lost. I think It wants us to get lost. To get separated.’
Bill looked at him for a moment, lips thin. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We a-all stay cluh-cluh-hose. No s-s-stragglers.’
They nodded back, frightened, clustered outside the hall door. Stan’s hand groped at the bird-book in his back pocket. Eddie was holding his aspirator in one hand, crunching it, loosening up, then crunching it again, like a ninety-eight-pound weakling trying to build up his muscles with a tennis ball.
Bill opened the door and here was another, narrower hall. The wallpaper, which showed runners of roses and elves wearing green caps, was falling away from the spongy plaster in draggling leaves. Yellow waterstains spread in senile rings on the ceiling overhead. A scummy wash of light fell through a dirty window at the end of the hall.
Abruptly the corridor seemed to elongate. The ceiling rose and then began to diminish above them like some weird rocket. The doors grew with the ceiling, pulled up like taffy. The faces of the elves grew long and became alien, their eyes bleeding black holes.
Stan shrieked and clapped his hands to his eyes.
‘Ih-Ih-hit’s not ruh-ruh-ruh-REAL!’ Bill screamed.
‘It is! ‘ Stan screamed back, his small closed fists plugging his eyes. ‘It’s real, you know it is, God, I’m going crazy, this is crazy, this is crazy —
‘Wuh-wuh-WATCH!’ Bill bellowed at Stan, at all of them, and Ben, his head reeling, watched as Bill bent down, coiled, and suddenly flung himself upward. His closed left fist struck nothing, nothing at all, but there was a heavy crr-rack ! sound. Plaster dust puffed from a place where there was no longer any ceiling . . . and then there was. The hallway was just a hallway again, narrow, low-ceilinged, dirty. But the walls no longer stretched up into forever. There was only Bill, looking at them and nursing his bleeding hand, which was floury with plaster-dust. Overhead was the clear mark his fist had made in the soft plaster of the ceiling.
‘N-N-Not ruh-ruh-real,’ he said to Stan, to all of them. ‘Just a –ff-false f-fuh –face. Like a Huh-Huh-Huh-Halloween muh-muh-hask.’
‘To you, maybe,’ Stan said dully. His face was shocked and horrified. He looked around as if no longer sure where he was. Looking at him, smelling the sour reek coming out of his pores, Ben, who had been overjoyed at Bill’s victory, got scared all over again. Stan was close to cracking up. Soon he would go into hysterics, begin to scream, perhaps, and what would happen then?
‘To you ,’ Sta n said again. ‘But if I’d tried that, nothing would have happened. Because . . . you’ve got your brother, Bill, but I don’t have anything.’ He looked around — first back toward the parlor, which had taken on a somber brown atmosphere, so thick and smoggy they could barely see the door through which they had entered it, to this hall, which was bright but somehow dark, somehow filthy, somehow utterly mad. Elves capered on the decaying wallpaper under runners of roses. Sun glared on the panes of the window at the end of the hall, and Ben knew that if they went down there they would see dead flies . . . more broken glass . . . and then what? The floorboards spreading apart, spilling them into a dead darkness where grasping fingers waited to catch them? Stan was right, God, why had they come into Its lair with nothing but their two stupid silver slugs and a fucking slingshot?
He saw Stan’s panic leap from one of them to the next to the next — like a grassfire driven by a hot wind, it widened in Eddie’s eyes, dropped Bev’s mouth into a wounded gasp, made Richie push his glasses up with both hands and stare around as if followed from close behind by a fiend.
They trembled on the brink of flight, Bill’s warning to