The flashlight illuminated gray and pink flesh, pulsing blood vessels visible through the skin. No eyes. Teeth. More teeth. Pink gut not so dissimilar from the tunnel itself.
The thing paused, tendril lips writhed, the lamprey mouth pulsated, and it came on at a terrific speed.
Mike fired the squirt gun first-Holy Mary, Mother of God-saw the water arch the ten feet, saw the pink flesh hiss, realized that the thing was too big to be destroyed or seriously inconvenienced by holy water or acid, saw it still rushing on, knew that he could never back away in time, and he fired the squirrel gun.
The blast deafened and blinded him.
He broke the breech, flipped out the empty, took a shell from his sleeve, slammed it home, clicked the breech shut.
He fired again, blinking away retinal echoes.
The thing had stopped ... it had to have stopped . . . he'd have been in its gut already if it hadn't stopped. The flashlight was askew. Mike reloaded, aimed, steadied the flashlight with his left hand.
It had stopped. Less than eight feet away. The circular jaw of the thing had been shattered in several places. Pieces of the tunnel dribbled onto it. Greenish-gray fluid leaked from the giant worm body.
It seemed more bemused than hurt, more curious than frightened.
"Fuck you!" screamed Mike between Hail Marys. He fired again. Reloaded. Thrust the squirrel gun another yard closer by wiggling forward and fired again. He had at least ten shells left. He wiggled and flopped to get some out of his right side pocket.
The lamprey thing withdrew around the bend in the tunnel.
Still screaming, only partially coherent, flailing on raw elbows and knees, Mike followed it as quickly as he could.
"Where are we?" whispered Dale.
They had come out of the boiler room into a narrow hall, followed it left around several corners, come into a wider corridor, and now were in a narrow one again. Giant pipes ran overhead. The basement hallways were littered with stacked school desks, empty cardboard drums, shattered chalkboards. And cobwebs. Many, many cobwebs.
"I don't know where we are," Harlen whispered back. Both boys had their flashlights on. The beams flickered from surface to surface like demented insects. "This west end of the basement was Van Syke's area. None of us came in here."
That was true enough. The hallway was narrow, the ceiling low, there were many small doors and access panels on the slanted concrete and stone walls. The pipes dripped moisture. Dale thought that the place was a maze, that they'd never find their way to the halls he knew from years of going to the basement restrooms. The stairway to the basement was below the central stairways.
They came around another turn. Dale's thumb had been tense on the hammer of the over-and-under for long minutes, even though it had been locked back. He was sure he was going to blow his own leg off any second. Both of Harlen's arms were straight out--the flashlight in the hand below the cast, the .38 revolver in the other hand. Harlen was moving like a jerky weathervane in a strong wind.
The basement of Old Central was not silent. Dale heard creakings, slidings, raspings-the pipes carried hollow echoes and reverberating moans, as if some huge mouth was breathing into them from above-while the thick stone walls seemed to be expanding and contracting slightly, as if something large was pressing and relaxing pressure from the opposite side.
Dale came around another corner, swinging the light in fast arcs, the Savage raised to his shoulder despite the ache in his right arm.
"Holy shit," Harlen whispered reverently as he came around behind him.
They were in the main basement corridor now. Dale recognized it from years of coming down to the restroom, marching down to the music and art rooms at the far end of this long hall. The stairways-one for coming down, one for going up-were another twenty yards along this corridor. Maybe.
The pipes dripped moist gray stalactites now. The walls were covered with what looked like a thin film of greenish oil. There were mounds of gray matter in the hall-like unformed stalagmites or giant, melted candles.
But that wasn't what had caused Harlen's comment: the walls were perforated with holes-some a foot and a half or so across, others opening from floor to ceiling. Tunnels ran off from the central corridor and disappeared into the soil and rock of the playground. A faint phosphorescence came from these tunnels; Dale and Harlen could have switched off their flashlights and still seen quite clearly in this windowless place.
They did not switch off their flashlights.
"Look," said Harlen. He pushed back a door that had the single word boy's stenciled on it. Inside what had been their restroom, the metal stalls had been ripped out of their mountings and twisted like thin tin. The toilets and urinals had been torn from their mountings and pushed almost to the ceiling, trailing torn pipes and dangling fittings.
The long room was almost filled with the gray stalactites, mounds of softly pulsating greenish wax, strands of something that looked like a spiderweb made of hairless flesh. The round hole in the wall to their left was at least eight feet across. Dale smelled the odor of wet earth and decay wafting out of it. There were a dozen other tunnels, some in the floor and ceiling.
"Let's go," whispered Harlen.
"Mike said he'd meet us down here."
"Mike may not be coming," hissed Harlen. "Let's find your brother and get our asses out."
Dale hesitated only a second.
The stairways had been shut off by swinging doors. One of them on the north side had been torn off its top hinges and hung askew. Dale leaned on it, shone his light up the stairway.
A dark fluid pulsed down the steps between gray mounds and the glazed, waxy icing on the walls. It came under the doors and pooled around Dale and Harlen's sneakers.
Dale took three deep breaths, wrenched the door aside, and led the way up the stairs, toward the first landing, feeling and hearing his tennis shoes squish on each step. The liquid was a dull brownish-red, but it felt too thick for water, possibly too thick for blood. More like motor oil or transmission fluid. It smelled a bit like cat urine.
Dale imagined a giant, three-story cat crouched above them, and he almost giggled. Harlen gave him a warning glance.
"Mike'll come up looking for us," he whispered to Harlen, not caring who heard. But at that second he did not believe that Mike was still alive.
Two long blocks south, across the abandoned and darkened Main Street, Bandstand Park was empty except for the limousine parked on the strip of gravel on the west side. The projector was still running because it had been plugged in to the volunteer fire department's circuit. The bandstand was silent, the large hole in the floor visible only from a certain angle. A large branch had fallen on the speakers, smashing both of them and silencing the film.
The screen had partially ripped loose from its moorings on the side of the Parkside Cafe, the fifteen-by-twenty-foot canvas slapping and snapping against siding like a fast-firing cannon. On the screen, a man and woman struggled in what looked to be a dungeon. The camera cut to a room above them where a tumbled candelabrum ignited a red velvet curtain. The fire spread, rising to the ceiling.
A woman opened her mouth to scream, but there was no noise except the crack of canvas and the louder crack of lightning.
A long semi went by on the Hard Road, its metal sides buffeted by the gale-force winds, its wipers flashing despite the fact that it was not raining here. It did not slow as it passed through the speed 25 mph electrically timed zone.
Lightning to the south revealed a solid wall of black moving across the fields toward Elm Haven at the speed a horse could run at full gallop, but there was no one to see it.
On the whipping screen and the white siding of the cafe, flames seemed three dimensional as they devoured the House of Usher.