It

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