ONESY AND THE BEAV

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1

Beaver said it again. No Beaver-isms now; just that bare Anglo-Saxon syllable you came to when you were up against the wall and had no other way to express the horror you saw. 'Ah, fuck, man - fuck.'

However much pain McCarthy had been in, he had taken time to snap on both of the switches just inside the bathroom door, lighting the fluorescent bars on either side of the medicine chest mirror and the overhead fluorescent ring. These threw a bright, even glare that gave the bathroom the feel of a crime-scene photograph . . . and yet there was a kind of stealthy surrealism, too, because the light wasn't quite steady; there was just enough flicker for you to know the power was coming from a genny and not through a line maintained by Derry and Bangor Hydroelectric.

The tile on the floor was baby blue. There were only spots and splatters of blood on it near the door, but as they approached the toilet next to the tub, the splotches ran together and became a red snake. Scarlet capillaries had spread off from this. The tiles were tattooed with the footprints of their boots, which neither Jonesy nor Beaver had taken off. On the blue vinyl shower curtain were four blurred fingerprints, and Jonesy thought: He must have reached out and grabbed at the curtain to keep from falling when he turned to sit.

Yes, but that wasn't the awful part. The awful part was what Jonesy saw in his mind's eye: McCarthy scuttling across the baby-blue tiles with one hand behind him, clutching himself, trying to hold something in.

'Ah, fuck!' Beaver said again. Almost sobbing. 'I don't want to see this, Jonesy - man, I can't see this.'

'We've got to.' He heard himself speaking as if from a great distance. 'We can do this, Beav. If we could face up to Richie Grenadeau and his friends that time, we can face up to this.'

'I dunno, man, I dunno . . .'

Jonesy didn't know, either - not really - but he reached out and took Beaver's hand. Beav's fingers closed over his with panicky tightness and together they went a step deeper into the bathroom. Jonesy tried to avoid the blood, but it was hard; there was blood everywhere. And not all of it was blood.

'Jonesy,' Beaver said in a dry near-whisper. 'Do you see that crud on the shower curtain?'

'Yeah.' Growing in the blurred fingerprints were little clumps of reddish-golden mold, like mildew. There was more of it on the floor, not in the fat blood-snake, but in the narrow angles of the grout.

'What is it?'

'I don't know,' Jonesy said. 'Same shit he had on his face, I guess. Shut up a minute.' Then: 'Mr McCarthy? . . . Rick?'

McCarthy, sitting there on the toilet, made no response. He had for some reason put his orange cap back on - the bill stuck off at a crooked, slightly drunken angle. He was otherwise naked. His chin was down on his breastbone, in a parody of deep thought (or maybe it wasn't a parody, who knew?). His eyes were mostly closed. His hands were clasped pritrdy together over his pubic thatch. Blood ran down the side of the toilet in a big sloppy paintstroke, but there was no blood on McCarthy himself, at least not as far as Jonesy could see.

One thing he could see: the skin of McCarthy's stomach hung in two slack dewlaps. The look of it reminded Jonesy of something, and after a moment or two it came to him. It was how Carla's stomach had looked after she had delivered each of their four children. Above McCarthy's hip, where there was a little lovehandle (and some give to the flesh), the skin was only red. Across the belly, however, it had split open in tiny weals. If McCarthy had been pregnant, it must have been with some sort of parasite, a tapeworm or a hookworm or something like that. Only there was stuff growing in his spilled blood, and what had he said as he lay there in Jonesy's bed with the blankets pulled up to his chin? Behold, I stand at the door and knock. This was one knock Jonesy wished he had never answered. In fact, he wished he had shot him. Yes. He saw more clearly now. He was hyped on the clarity that sometimes comes to the completely horrified mind, and in that state wished he had put a bullet in McCarthy before he saw the orange cap and the orange flagman's vest. It couldn't have hurt and it might have helped.

'Stand at the door and knock on my ass,' Jonesy muttered.

'Jonesy? Is he still alive?'

'I don't know.'

Jonesy took another step forward and felt Beaver's fingers slide out of his; the Beav had apparently come as close to McCarthy as he was able.

'Rick?' Jonesy asked in a hushed voice. A don't-wake-the-baby voice. A viewing-the-corpse voice. 'Rick, are you - '

There was a loud, dank fart from beneath the man on the toilet, and the room immediately filled with an eyewatering aroma of excrement and airplane glue. Jonesy thought it a wonder that the shower curtain didn't melt.

From the bowl there came a splash. Not the plop of a turd dropping - at least Jonesy didn't think so. It sounded more like a fish jumping in a pond.

'Christ almighty, the stink of it! 'Beaver cried. He had the heel of his hand over his mouth and nose and his words were muffled. 'But if he can fart, he must be alive. Huh, Jonesy? He must still be - '

'Hush,' Jonesy said in a quiet voice. He was astonished at its steadiness. 'Just hush, okay?' And the Beav hushed.

Jonesy leaned in close. He could see everything: the small stipple of blood in McCarthy's right eyebrow, the red growth on his cheek, the blood on the blue plastic curtain, the joke sign - LAMAR'S THINKIN PLACE - that had hung in here when the toilet was still of the chemical variety and the shower had to be pumped up before it could be used. He saw the little gelid gleam from between McCarthy's eyelids and the cracks in his lips, which looked purple and liverish in this light. He could smell the noxious aroma of the passed gas and could almost see that, too, rising in filthy dark yellow streamers, like mustard gas.

'McCarthy? Rick? Can you hear me?'

He snapped his fingers in front of those nearly closed eyes. Nothing. He licked a spot on the back of his wrist and held it first in front of McCarthy's nostrils, then in front of his lips. Nothing.

'He's dead, Beav,' he said, drawing back.

'Bullshit he is,' Beaver replied. His voice was ragged, absurdly offended, as if McCarthy had violated all the rules of hospitality. 'He just dropped a clinker, man, I heard it.'

'I don't think that was - '

Beav stepped past him, bumping Jonesy's bad hip against the sin k hard enough to hurt. 'That's enough, fella!' Beaver cried. He grabbed McCarthy's round freckled unmuscled shoulder and shook it. 'Snap out of it! Snap - '

McCarthy listed slowly tubward and Jonesy had a moment when he thought Beaver had been right after all, the guy was still alive, alive and trying to get up. Then McCarthy fell off the throne and into the tub, pushing the shower curtain ahead of him in a filmy blue billow. The orange hat fell off. There was a bony crack as his skull hit the porcelain and then Jonesy and Beaver were screaming and clutching each other, the sound of their horror deafening in the little tile-lined room. McCarthy's ass was a lopsided full moon with a giant bloody crater in its center, the site of some terrible impact, it seemed. Jonesy saw it for only a second before McCarthy collapsed facedown into the tub and the curtain floated back into place, hiding him, but in that second it seemed to Jonesy that the hole was a foot across. Could that be? A foot? Surely not.

In the toilet bowl, something splashed again, hard enough to spatter droplets of bloody water up onto the ring, which was also blue. Beaver started to lean forward to look in, and Jonesy slammed the lid down on the ring without even thinking about it. 'No,' he said.

'No?'

'No.'

Beaver tried to get a toothpick out of the front pocket of his overalls, came up with half a dozen, and dropped them on the floor. They rolled across the bloody blue tiles like jackstraws. The Beav looked at them, then looked up at Jonesy. There were tears standing in his eyes. 'Like Duddits, man,' he said.

'What in God's name are you talking about?'

'Don't you remember? He was almost naked, too. Fuckers snatched off his shirt and his pants, didn't leave him nothing but his underpants. But we saved him.' Beaver nodded vigorously, as if Jonesy - or some deep and doubtful part of himself - had scoffed at this idea.

Jonesy scoffed at nothing, although McCarthy didn't remind him in the slightest of Duddits. He kept seeing McCarthy going over sideways into the tub, his orange hat falling off, the fatty deposits on his chest (the tits of easy living, Henry called them whenever he saw a pair underneath some guy's polo shirt) wobbling. And then his ass turning up to the light - that harsh fluorescent light that kept no secrets but blabbed everything in a droning monotone. That perfect white man's ass, hairless, just starting to turn flabby and settle down on the backs of the thighs; he had seen a thousand like it in the various locker rooms where he had dressed and showered, was developing one himself (or had been until the guy had run him over, changing the physical configuration of his backside perhaps forever), only he had never seen one like McCarthy's was now, one that looked like something inside had fired a flare or a shotgun shell in order to - ?to what?

There was another hollow splash from the toilet. The Ed bumped up. It was as good an answer as any. In order to get out, of course.

In order to get out.

'Sit on that,' Jonesy told Beaver.

'Huh?'

'Sit on it!' Jonesy almost shouted it this time and Beaver sat down on the closed Ed in a hurry, looking startled. In the no-secrets, flat-toned light of the fluorescents, Beaver's skin looked as white as freshly turned clay and every fleck of black stubble was a mole. His lips were purple. Above his head was the old joke sign: LAMAR'S THINKIN PLACE. Beav's blue eyes were wide and terrified.

'I'm sittin, Jonesy - see?'

'Yeah. I'm sorry, Beav. But you just sit there, all right? Whatever he had inside him, it's trapped. Got nowhere to go but the septic tank. I'll be back - '

'Where you goin? Cause I don't want you to leave me sittin in the shithouse next to a dead man, Jonesy. If we both run - '

'We're not running,' Jonesy said grimly. 'This is our place, and we're not running.' Which sounded noble but left out at least one aspect of the situation: he was mostly just afraid the thing that was now in the toilet might be able to run faster than they could. Or squiggle faster. Or something. Clips from a hundred horror films - Parasite, Alien, They Came from Within - ran through his mind at super-speed. Carla wouldn't go to the movies with him when one of those was playing, and she made him go downstairs and use the TV in his study when he brought them home on tape. But one of those movies - something he'd seen in one of them - just might save their lives. Jonesy glanced at the reddish-gold mildewy stuff growing on McCarthy's bloody handprint. Save their lives from the thing in the toilet, anyway. The mildewy stuff . . . who in God's name knew?

The thing in the bowl leaped again, thudding the underside of the lid, but Beaver had no trouble holding the lid down. That was good. Maybe whatever it was would drown in there, although Jonesy didn't see how they could count on that; it had been living inside McCarthy, hadn't it? It had been living inside old Mr Behold-I-stand-at-the-door-and-knock for quite some time, maybe the whole four days he'd been lost in the woods. It had slowed the growth of McCarthy's beard, it seemed, and caused a few of his teeth to fall out; it had also caused McCarthy to pass gas that probably couldn't have gone ignored even in the politest of polite society - farts like poison gas, to be perfectly blunt about it - but the thing itself had apparently been fine . . . lively . . . growing . . .

Jonesy had a sudden vivid image of a wriggling white tapeworm emerging from a pile of raw meat. His gorge rose with a liquid chugging sound.

'Jonesy?' Beaver started to get up. He looked more alarmed than ever.

'Beaver, sit back down!'

Beaver did, just in time. The thing in the toilet leaped and hit the underside of the lid with a hard, hollow rap. Behold, I stand at the door and knock.

'Remember that Lethal Weapon movie where Mel Gibson's partner didn't dare to get off the crapper?' Beaver said. He smiled, but his voice was dry and his eyes were terrified. 'This is like that, isn't it?'

'No,' Jonesy said, 'because nothing's going to blow up. Besides, I'm not Mel Gibson and you're too fucking white to be Danny Glover. Listen, Beav. I'm going out to the shed - '

'Huh-uh, no way, don't leave me here all by myself - '

'Shut up and listen. There's friction tape out there, isn't there?'

'Yeah, hangin on a nail, at least I think - '

'Hanging on a nail, that's right. Near the paint-cans, I think. A big fat roll of it. I'm going to get that, then come back and tape the Ed down. Then - '

It leaped again, furiously, as if it could hear and understand. Well, how do we know it can't? Jonesy thought. When it hit the bottom of the lid with a hard, vicious thud, the Beav winced.

'Then we're getting out of here,' Jonesy finished.

'On the Cat?'

Jonesy nodded, although he had in fact forgotten all about the snowmobile. 'Yeah, on the Cat. And we'll hook up with Henry and Pete - '

The Beav was shaking his head. 'Quarantine, that's what the guy in the helicopter said. That must be why they haven't come back yet, don't you think? They musta got held out by the - '

Thud!

Beaver winced. So did Jonesy.

' - by the quarantine.'

'That could be,' Jonesy said. 'But listen, Beav - I'd rather be quarantined with Pete and Henry than here with . . . than here, wouldn't you?'

'Let's just flush it down,' Beaver said. 'How about that?' Jonesy shook his head.

'Why not?'

'Because I saw the hole it made getting out,' Jonesy said, 'and so did you. I don't know what it is, but we're not going to get rid of it just by pushing a handle. It's too big.'

'Fuck.' Beaver slammed the heel of his hand against his fore?head.

Jonesy nodded.

'All right, Jonesy. Go get the tape.'

In the doorway, Jonesy paused and looked back. 'And Beaver ... ?'

The Beav raised his eyebrows.

'Sit tight, buddy - '

Beaver started to giggle. So did Jonesy. They looked at each other, Jonesy in the doorway and the Beav sitting on the closed toilet seat, snorting laughter. Then Jonesy burned across the big central room (still giggling - sit tight, the more he thought about it the funnier it seemed) toward the kitchen door. He felt hot and feverish, both horrified and hilarious. Sit tight. Jesus-Christ-Bananas.

2

Beav could hear Jonesy giggling all the way across the room, still giggling when he went out the door. In spite of everything, Beav was glad to hear that sound. It had already been a bad year for Jonesy, getting run over the way he had - for awhile there at first they'd all thought he was going to step out, and that was awful, poor old Jonesy wasn't yet thirty - eight. Bad year for Pete, who'd been drinking too much, a bad year for Henry, who sometimes got a spooky absence about him that Beav didn't understand and didn't like . . . and now he guessed you could say it had been a bad year for Beaver Clarendon, as well. Of course this was only one day in three hundred and sixty-five, but you just didn't get up in the morning thinking that by afternoon there'd be a dead guy laying naked in the tub and you'd be sitting on a closed toilet seat in order to keep something you hadn't even seen from -

'Nope,' Beaver said. 'Not going there, okay? Just not going there.'

And he didn't have to. Jonesy would be back with the friction tape in a minute or two, three minutes tops. The question was where did he want to go until Jonesy returned? Where could he go and feel good?

Duddits, that was where. Thinking about Duddits always made him feel good. And Roberta, thinking about her was good, too. Undoubtedly.

Beav smiled, remembering the little woman in the yellow dress who'd been standing at the end of her walk on Maple Lane that day. The smile widened as he remembered how she'd caught sight of them. She had called her boy that same thing. She had called him.

3

'Duddits!' she cries, a little graying wren of a woman in a flowered print dress, then runs up the sidewalk toward them.

Duddits has been walking contentedly with his new friends, chattering away six licks to the minute, holding his Scooby-Doo lunchbox in his left hand and Jonesy's hand in his right, swinging it cheerfully back and forth. His gabble seems to consist almost entirely of open vowel-sounds. The thing which amazes Beaver the most about it is how much of it he understands.

Now, catching sight of the graying birdie-woman, Duddits lets go of Jonesy's hand and runs toward her, both of them running, and it reminds Beaver of some musical about a bunch of singers, the Von Cripps or Von Crapps or something like that. 'Ah-mee, Ah-mee!' Duddits shouts exuberantly - Mommy! Mommy!

'Where have you been? Where have you been, you bad boy, you bad old Duddits!'

They come together and Duddits is so much bigger - two or three inches taller, too - that Beaver winces, expecting the birdie-woman to be flattened the way Coyote is always getting flattened in the Roadrunner cartoons. Instead, she picks him up and swings him around, his sneakered feet flying out behind him, his mouth stretched halfway up to his ears in an expression of joyful ecstasy.

'I was just about to go in and call the police, you bad old late thing, you bad old late D - '

She sees Beaver and his friends and sets her son down on his feet. Her smile of relief is gone; she is solemn as she steps toward them over some little girl's hopscotch grid - crude as it is, Beav thinks, even that will always be beyond Duddits. The tears on her checks gleam in the glow of the sun that has finally broken through.

'Uh-oh,' Pete says. 'We're gonna catch it.'

'Be cool,' Henry says, speaking low and fast. 'Let her rant and then I'll explain.'

But they have misjudged Roberta Cavell - have judged her by the standard of so many adults who seem to view boys their age as guilty until proven innocent. Roberta Cavell isn't that way, and neither is her husband, Alfie. The Cavells are different. Duddits has made them different.

'Boys,' she says again. 'Was he wandering? Was he lost? I've been so afraid to let him walk, but he wants so much to be a real boy . . .'

She gives Beaver's fingers a strong squeeze with one hand and Pete's with the other. Then she drops them, takes Jonesy's and Henry's hands, and gives them the same treatment.

'Ma'am . . .' Henry begins.

Mrs Cavell looks at Henry with fixed concentration, as if she is trying to read his mind. 'Not just lost,' she says. 'Not just wandering.' 'Ma'am Henry tries again, and then gives up any thought of dissembling. It is Duddits's green gaze looking up at him from her face, only intelligent and aware, keen and questioning. 'No, ma'am.' Henry sighs. 'Not just wandering.'

'Because usually he comes right home. He says he can't get lost because he sees the line. How many were there?'

'Oh, a few,' Jonesy says, then shoots a swift look at Henry. Beside them, Duddits has found a last few gone-to-seed dandelions on the neighbors' lawn and is down on his belly, blowing the fluff off them and watching it float away on the breeze. 'A few boys were teasing him, ma'am.'

'Big boys,' Pete says.

Again her eyes search them, from Jonesy to Pete, from Pete to Beaver, and then back to Henry again. 'Come up to the house with us,' she says. 'I want to hear all about it. Duddits has a big glass of ZaRex every afternoon - it's his special drink - but I'll bet you guys would rather have iced tea. Wouldn't you?'

The three of them look at Henry, who considers and then nods. 'Yes, ma'am, iced tea would be great.'

So she leads them back to the house where they'll spend so much of their time in the following years - the house at 19 Maple Lane - only it is really Duddits who leads the way, prancing, skipping, sometimes lifting his yellow Scooby-Doo lunchbox over his head, but always, Beaver notices, keeping at almost exactly the same place on the sidewalk, about a foot from the grass margin between the walk and the street. Years later, after the thing with the Rinkenhauer girl, he will consider what Mrs Cavell said. They all will. He sees the line.

4

'Jonesy?' Beaver called.

No answer. Christ, it seemed like Jonesy had been gone a long

time. Probably hadn't been, but there was no way Beaver could tell; he'd forgotten to put on his watch that morning. Stupid, but then, he'd always been stupid, he ought to be used to it by now. Next to Jonesy and Henry, both he and Pete had been stupid. Not that Jonesy or Henry had ever treated them that way - that was one of the great things about them.

'Jonesy?'

Still nothing. Probably he was having trouble finding the tape, that was all.

There was a vile little voice far back in Beaver's head telling him that the tape had nothing to do with it, that Jonesy had just gone Powder River, leaving him here to sit on the toilet like Danny Glover in that movie, but he wouldn't listen to that voice because Jonesy would never do anything like that. They were friends to the end, always had been.

That's right, the vile voice agreed. You were friends. And this is the end.

'Jonesy? You there, man?'

Still nothing. Maybe the tape had fallen off the nail it had been hung on.

Nothing from beneath him, either. And hey, it really wasn't possible that McCarthy had shit some kind of monster into the john, was it? That he'd given birth to - Gasp! - The Beast in the Bowl? It sounded like a horror-movie spoof on Saturday Night Live. And even if that had happened, The Beast in the Bowl had probably drowned by now, drowned or gone deep. A line from a story suddenly occurred to him, one they'd read to Duddits - taking turns, and it was good there were four of them because when Duddits liked something he never got tired of it.

'Eee doool!' Duddits would shout, running to one of them with the book held high over his head, the way he'd carried his lunchbox home that first day. 'Eee doool, eee doool!' Which in this case meant Read Pool! Read Pool! The book was McElligot's Pool, by Dr. Seuss, the first memorable couplet of which went, 'Young man,' (argued the farmer) 'You're sort of a fool! You'll never catch fish in McElligot's Pool!' But there had been fish, at least in the imagination of the little boy in the story. Plenty of fish. Big fish.

No splashes from beneath him, though. No bumps on the underside of the lid, either. Not for awhile now. He could maybe risk one quick look, just raise the lid a little and slam it back down if anything -

But sit tight, buddy was the last thing Jonesy had said to him, and that was what he'd better do.

Jonesy's most likely a mile down the road by now, the vile voice estimated. A mile down the road and still picking up speed.

'No, he ain't,' Beaver said. 'Not Jonesy.'

He shifted a little bit on the closed seat, waiting for the thing to jump, but it didn't. It might be sixty yards away by now and swimming with the turds in the septic tank. Jonesy had said it was too big to go down, but since neither of them had actually seen it, there was no way to tell for sure, was there? But in either case, Monsieur Beaver Clarendon was going to sit right here. Because he'd said he would. Because time always seemed slower when you were worried or scared. And because he trusted Jonesy. Jonesy and Henry had never hurt him or made fun, not of him and not of Pete. And none of them had ever hurt Duddits or made fun of him, either.

Beav snorted laughter. Duddits with his Scooby-Doo lunchbox. Duddits on his belly, blowing the fluff off dandelions. Duddits running around in his back yard, happy as a bird in a tree, yeah, and people who called kids like him special didn't know the half of it. He had been special, all right, their present from a fucked-up world that usually didn't give you jack-shit. Duddits had been their own special thing, and they had loved him.

5

They sit in the sunny kitchen nook - the clouds have gone away as if by magic - drinking iced tea and watching Duddits, who drank his ZaRex (awful-looking orange stuff) in three or four huge splattering gulps and then ran out back to play.

Henry does most of the talking, telling Mrs Cavell that the boys were just 'kinda pushing him around.' He says that they got a little bit rough and ripped his shirt, which scared Duddits and made him cry. There is no mention of how Richie Grenadeau and his friends took off his pants, no mention of the nasty after - school snack they wanted Duddits to eat, and when Mrs Cavell asks them if they know who these big boys were, Henry hesitates briefly and then says no, just some big boys from the high school, he didn't know any of them, hot by name. She looks at Beaver, Jonesy, and Pete; they all shake their heads. It may be wrong - dangerous to Duddits in the long run, as well - but they can't step that far outside the rules which govern their lives. Already Beaver cannot understand where they found the sack to intervene in the first place, and later the others will say the same. They marvel at their courage; they also marvel that they aren't in the fuckin hospital.

She looks at them sadly for a moment, and Beaver realizes she knows a lot of what they aren't telling, probably enough to keep her awake that night. Then she smiles. Right at Beaver she smiles, and it makes him tingle all the way down to his toes. 'What a lot of zippers you have on your jacket!' she says.

Beaver smiles. 'Yes, ma'am. It's my Fonzie jacket. It was my brother's first. These guys make fun of it, but I like it just the same.'

'Happy Days,' she says. 'We like it, too. Duddits likes it. Perhaps you'd like to come over some night and watch it with us. With him.' Her smile grows wistful, as if she knows nothing like that will ever happen.

'Yeah, that'd be okay,' Beav says.

'Actually it would,' Pete agrees.

They sit for a little without talking, just watching him play in the back yard. There's a swing - set with two swings. Duddits runs behind them, pushing them, making the swings go by themselves. Sometimes he stops, crosses his arms over his chest, turns the clockless dial of his face up to the sky, and laughs.

'Seems all right now,' Jonesy says, and drinks the last of his tea. 'Guess he's forgotten all about it.'

Mrs Cavell has started to get up. Now she sits back down, giving him an almost startled look. 'Oh no, not at all,' she says. 'He remembers. Not like you and I, perhaps, but he remembers things. He'll probably have nightmares tonight, and when we go into his room - his father and me - he won't be able to explain. That's the worst for him; he can't tell what it is he sees and thinks and feels. He doesn't have the vocabulary.'

She sighs.

'In any case, those boys won't forget about him. What if they're laying for him now? What if they're laying for you?'

'We can take care of ourselves,' Jonesy says, but although his voice is stout enough, his eyes are uneasy,

'Maybe,' she says. 'But what about Duddits? I can walk him to school - I used to, and I suppose I'll have to again, for awhile at least, anyway - but he loves to walk home on his own so much.'

'It makes him feel like a big boy,' Pete says.

She reaches across the table and touches Pete's hand, making him blush. 'That's right, it makes him feel like a big boy.'

'You know,' Henry says, 'we could walk him. We all go together to the junior high, and it would be easy enough to come down here from Kansas Street.' -

Roberta Cavell only sits there without saying anything, a little birdie-woman in a print dress, looking at Henry attentively, like someone waiting for the punchline of a joke.

'Would that be okay, Missus Cavell?' Beaver asks her. 'Because we could do it, easy. Or maybe you don't want us to.'

Something complicated happens to Mrs CaveE's face - there are all those little twitches, mostly under the skin. One eye almost winks, and then the other one does wink. She takes a handkerchief from her pocket and blows her nose. Beaver thinks, She's trying not to laugh at us. When he tells Henry that as they are walking home, Jonesy and Pete already dropped off, Henry will look at him with utter astonishment. Cry is what she was tryin not to do, he will say . . . and then, affectionately, after a pause: Dope.

'You would do that?' she asks, and when Henry nods for all of them, she changes the question slightly. 'Why would you do that?' Henry looks around as if to say Someone else take this one, willya?

Pete says, 'We like him, ma'am.'

Jonesy is nodding. 'I like the way he carries his lunchbox over his head - '

'Yeah, that's bitchin,' Pete says. Henry kicks him under the table. Pete replays what he just said - you can see him doing it ?and begins blushing furiously.

Mrs Cavell appears not to notice. She's looking at Henry with fixed intensity. 'He has to go by quarter of eight,' she says.

'We're always near here by then,' Henry replies. 'Aren't we, you guys?'

And although seven forty-five is in fact a little early for them, they all nod and say yeah right sure yeah.

'You would do that?' she asks again, and this time Beaver has no trouble reading her tone; she is incredyouwhatsis, the word that means you can't fuckin believe it.

'Sure,' Henry says. 'Unless you think Duddits wouldn't . . . you know . . .'

'Wouldn't want us to,' Jonesy finishes.

'Are you crazy?' she asks. Beaver thinks she is speaking to herself, trying to convince herself that these boys are really in her kitchen, that all of this is in fact happening. 'Walking to school with the big boys? Boys who go to what Duddits calls "real school"? He'd think he was in heaven.'

'Okay,' Henry says. 'We'll come by quarter of eight, walk him to school. And we'll walk home with him, too.'

'He gets out at - '

'Aw, we know what time The Retard Academy gets out,' Beaver says cheerfully, and realizes a second before he sees the others' stricken faces that he's said something a lot worse than bitchin. He claps his hands over his mouth. Above them, his eyes are huge. Jonesy kicks his shin so hard under the table that Beav almost tumbles over backward.

'Don't mind him, ma'am,' Henry says. He is talking rapidly, which he only does when he's embarrassed. 'He just - '

'I don't mind,' she says. 'I know what people call it. Sometimes Alfie and I call it that ourselves.' This topic, incredibly, hardly seems to interest her. 'Why?' she says again.

And although it's Henry she's looking at, it's Beaver who answers, in spite of his blazing cheeks. 'Because he's cool,' he says. The others nod.

They will walk Duddits to school and back for the next five years or so, unless he is sick or they are at Hole in the Wall; by the end of it Duddits is no longer going to Mary M. Snowe, aka The Retard Academy, but to Derry Vocational, where he learns to bake cookies (baitin tooties, in Duddits-ese), replace car batteries, make change, and fie his own tie (the knot is always perfect, although it sometimes appears about halfway down his shirt). By then the Josie Rinkenhauer thing has come and gone, a little nine days' wonder forgotten by everyone except Josie's parents, who will never forget. In those years when they walk with him to and from his school, Duddits will sprout up until he's the tallest of all of them, a gangly teenager with a strangely beautiful child's face. By then they will have taught him how to play Parcheesi and a simplified version of Monopoly; by then they will have invented the Duddits Game and played it incessantly, sometimes laughing so hard that Alfie Cavell (he was the tall one of the pair, but he also had a birdie look about him) would come to the head of the stairs in the kitchen, the ones that led to the rec room, and yell down at them, wanting to know what was going on, what was so funny, and maybe they would try to explain that Duddits had pegged Henry fourteen on a two hand or that Duddits had pegged Pete fifteen backward, but Alfie never seemed to get it; he'd stand there at the head of the stairs with a section of the newspaper in his hand, smiling perplexedly, and at last he'd always say the same thing, Keep it down to a dull roar, boys, and close the door, leaving them to their own devices . . . and of all those devices the Duddits Game was the best, totally bitchin, as Pete would have said. There were times when Beaver thought he might actually laugh until he exploded, and Duddits sitting there all the time on the rug beside the big old Parkmunn cribbage board, feet folded under him and grinning like Buddha. What a fuckaree! All of that ahead of them but now just this kitchen, and the surprising sun, and Duddits outside, pushing the swings. Duddits who had done them such a favor by coming into their lives. Duddits who is - they know it from the first - not like anyone else they know.

'I don't see how they could have done it,' Pete says suddenly. 'The way he was crying. I don't see how they could have gone on teasing him.'

Roberta Cavell looks at him sadly. 'Older boys don't hear him the same way,' she says. 'I hope you never understand.'

6

'Jonesy!' Beaver shouted. 'Hey, Jonesy!'

This time there's a response, faint but unmistakable. The snowmobile shed was a kind of ground-level attic, and one of the things out there was an old-fashioned bulb horn, the kind a bicycle deliveryman back in the twenties or thirties might have had mounted on the handlebars of his bike. Now Beaver heard it: Ooogah! How-oogah! A noise that surely would have made Duddits laugh until he cried - a sucker for big, juicy noises, that had been ole Duds.

The filmy blue shower curtain rustled and the Beav's arms broke out in lush bundles of gooseflesh. For a moment he almost leaped up, thinking that it was McCarthy, then realized he'd brushed the curtain with his own elbow - it was close quarters in here, close quarters, no doubt - and settled back. Still nothing from beneath him, though; that thing, whatever it was, was either dead or gone. For certain.

Well . . . almost for certain.

The Beav reached behind him, fingered the flush lever for a moment, then let his hand fall away. Sit tight, Jonesy had said, and Beaver would, but why the fuck didn't Jonesy come back? If he couldn't find the tape, why didn't he just come back without it? It had to have been at least ten minutes now, didn't it? And felt like a fucking hour. Meantime, here he sat on the john with a dead man in the tub beside him, one who looked as if his ass had been blown open by dynamite, man, talk about having to take a shit -

'Beep the horn again, at least,' Beaver muttered. 'Honk that jeezly thing, let me know you're still there.' But Jonesy didn't.

7

Jonesy couldn't find the tape.

He'd looked everywhere and couldn't find it anywhere. He knew it had to be here, but it wasn't hanging from any of the nails and it wasn't on the tool-littered worktable. It wasn't behind the paint-cans, or on the hook beneath the old painting masks that hung there by their yellowing elastics. He looked under the table, looked in the boxes stacked against the far wall, then in the compartment under the Arctic Cat's passenger seat. There was a spare headlight in there, still in its carton, and half a pack of ancient Lucky Strikes, but no goddam tape. He could feel the minutes ticking away. Once he was pretty sure he heard the Beav calling for him, but he didn't want to go back without the tape and so he blew the old horn that was lying on the floor, pumping its cracked black rubber horn and making an oogah-oogah sound that Duddits no doubt would have loved.

The more he looked for the tape and didn't find it, the more imperative it seemed. There was a hall of twine, but how would you tie down a toilet seat with twine, for Christ's sake? And there was Scotch tape in one of the kitchen drawers, he was almost sure of it, but the thing in the toilet had sounded pretty strong, like a good-sized fish or something. Scotch tape just wasn't good enough.

Jonesy stood beside the Arctic Cat, looking around with wide eyes, running his hands through his hair (he hadn't put his gloves back on and he'd been out here long enough to nunib his fingers), breathing out big white puffs of vapor.

'Where the fuck?' he asked aloud, and slammed his fist down on the table. A stack of little boxes filled with nails and screws fell over when he did, and there was the friction tape behind them, a big fat roll of it. He must have looked right past it a dozen times.

He grabbed it, stuffed it in his coat pocket - he had remembered to put that on, at least, although he hadn't bothered to zip it up - and turned to go. And that was when Beaver began to screaming. His calls had been barely there, but Jonesy had no trouble at all hearing the screams. They were big, lusty, filled with pain.

Jonesy sprinted for the door.

8

Beaver's Mom had always said the toothpicks would kill him, but she had never imagined anything like this.

Sitting there on the closed toilet seat, Beaver felt in the bib pocket of his overalls for a pick to chew on, but there weren't any - they were scattered all over the floor. Two or three had landed clear of the blood, but he'd have to rise up off the toilet seat a little to get them - rise up and lean forward.

Beaver debated. Sit tight, Jonesy had said, but surely the thing in the toilet was gone; dive, dive, dive, as they said in the submarine war movies. Even if it wasn't, he'd only be lifting his ass for a second or two. If the thing jumped, Beaver could bring his weight right back down again, maybe break its scaly little neck for it (always assuming it had one).

He looked longingly at the toothpicks, Three or four were close enough so he could just reach down and pick them up, but he wasn't going to put bloody toothpicks in his mouth, especially considering where the blood had come from. There was something else, too. That funny furry stuff was growing on the blood, growing in the gutters of grout between the tiles, as well - he could see it more clearly than ever. It was on some of the toothpicks, too . . . but not on those which had fallen clear of the blood. Those were clean and white, and if he had ever in his life needed the comfort of something in his mouth, a little piece of wood to gnaw on, it was now.

'Fuck it,' the Beav murmured, and leaned forward, reaching out. His stretching fingers came up just short of the nearest clean pick. He flexed the muscles of his thighs and his butt came up off the seat. His fingers closed on the toothpick - ah, got it - and something hit the closed lid of the toilet seat at just that moment, hit it with terrifying force, driving it up into his unprotected balls and knocking him forward. Beaver grabbed at the shower curtain in a last-ditch effort to maintain his balance, but it pulled free of the bar in a metallic clitter-clack of rings. His boots slipped in the blood and he went sprawling forward onto the floor like a man blown out of an ejection seat. Behind him he heard the toilet seat fly up hard enough to crack the porcelain tank.

Something wet and heavy landed on Beaver's back. Something that felt like a tail or a worm or a muscular segmented tentacle curled between his legs and seized his already aching balls in a contracting python's grip. Beaver screamed, chin lifting from the bloody tiles (a red crisscross pattern tattooed faintly on his chin), eyes bulging. The thing lay wet and cold and heavy from the nape of his neck to the small of his back, like a rolled-up breathing rug, and now it began to utter a feverish high-pitched chattering noise, the sound of a rabid monkey.

Beaver screamed again, wriggled toward the door on his belly, then lurched up onto all fours, trying to shake the thing off. The muscular rope between his legs squeezed again, and there was a low popping sound from somewhere in the liquid haze of pain that was now his groin.

Oh Christ, the Beav thought. Mighty Christ bananas, I think that was one of my balls.

Squealing, sweating, tongue dancing in and out of his mouth like a demented party-favor, Beaver did the only thing he could think of: rolled over onto his back, trying to crush the whatever-it-was between his spine and the tiles. It chittered in his ear, almost deafening him, and began to wriggle frantically. Beaver seized the tail curled between his legs, smooth and hairless on top, thorny - as if plated with hooks made of clotted hair - underneath. And wet. Water? Blood? Both?

'Ahhh! A hhh! Oh God let go! Fuckin thing, let go! Jesus! My fuckin sack! Jeesus!'

Before he could get either hand beneath the tail, a mouthful of needles sank into the side of his neck. He reared up, bellowing, and then the thing was gone. Beaver tried to get to his feet. He had to push with his hands because there was no strength in his legs, and his hands kept slipping. In addition to McCarthy's blood, the bathroom floor was now covered with murky water from the cracked toilet tank and the tiled surface was a skating rink.

As he finally got up, he saw something clinging to the doorway about halfway up. It looked like some kind of freak weasel - no legs but with a thick reddish-gold tail. There was no real head, only a kind of slippery-looking node from which two feverish black eyes stared.

The lower half of the node split open, revealing a nest of teeth. The thing struck at Beaver like a snake, the node lash?ing forward, the hairless tail curled around the doorjamb. Beaver screamed and raised a hand in front of his face. Three of the four fingers on it - all but the pinky - disappeared. There was no pain, either that or the pain from his ruptured testicle swal?lowed it whole. He tried to step away, but the backs of his knees struck the bowl of the battered toilet. There was nowhere to go.

That thing was in him? Beaver thought; there was time for that much. It was in him?

Then it uncoiled its tall or its tentacle or whatever it was and leaped at him, the top half of its rudimentary head full of its stupidly furious black eyes, the lower half a packet of bone needles. Far away, in some other universe where there still might be sane life, Jonesy was calling his name, but Jonesy was late, Jonesy was way late.

The thing that had been in McCarthy landed on the Beav's chest with a smack. It smelled like McCarthy's wind - a heavy reek of oil and ether and methane gas. The muscular whip that was its lower body wrapped around Beaver's waist. Its head darted forward and its teeth closed on Beaver's nose.

Screaming, beating at it with his fists, Beaver fell backward onto the toilet. The ring and the lid had flown up against the tank when the thing came out. The lid had stayed up, but the ring had fallen back into place. Now the Beav landed on it, broke it, and dropped ass-first into the toilet with the weasel - thing clutching him around the waist and chewing his face.

'Beaver! Beav, what - '

Beaver felt the thing stiffen against him - it literally stiffened, like a dick getting hard. The grip of the tentacle around his waist tightened, then loosened. Its black-eyed idiotic face whipped around toward the sound of Jonesy's voice, and Beav saw his old friend through a haze of blood, and with dimming eyes: Jonesy standing slack-jawed in the doorway, a roll of friction tape (won't need that now, Beaver thought, nah) in one dangling hand. Jonesy stand?ing there utterly defenseless in his shocked horror. This thing's next meal.

'Jonesy, get outta here!' Beaver shouted. His voice was wet, strained through a mouthful of blood. He sensed the thing getting ready to leap and wrapped his arms around its pulsing body as if it were his lover. 'Get out! Shut the door! B - ' Burn it, he wanted to say. Lock it in, lock both of us in, burn it, burn it alive, I'm going to sit here ass-deep in this fucking toilet with my arms wrapped around it, and if I can die smelling it roast, I can die happy. But the thing was struggling too hard and fucking Jonesy was just standing there with that roll of friction tape in his hand and his jaw dropped, and goddam if he didn't look like Duddits, dumb as a stone boat and never going to improve. Then the thing turned back to Beaver, its earless noseless node of a head drawn back, and before that head darted forward and the world detonated for the last time, Beaver had a final, partial thought: Those toothpicks, damn, Mamma always said -

Then the exploding red and blooming black and somewhere far off the sound of his own screams, the final ones.

9

Jonesy saw Beaver sitting in the toilet with something that looked like a giant red - gold worm clinging to him. He called out and the thing turned toward him, no real head, just the black eyes of a shark and a mouthful of teeth. Something in the teeth, something that couldn't be the mangled remains of Beaver Clarendon's nose but probably was.

Run away! he screamed at himself, and then: Save him! Save Beaver!

Both imperatives had equal power, and the result kept him frozen in the doorway, feeling as if he weighed a thousand pounds. The thing in Beaver's arms was making a noise, a crazed chattering sound that got into his head and made him think of something, something from a long time ago, he didn't know just what.

Then Beaver was screaming at him from his awkward sprawl in the toilet, telling him to get out, to shut the door, and the thing turned back to the sound of his voice as if recalled to temporarily forgotten business, and it was Beaver's eyes it went for this time, his fucking eyes, Beaver writhing and screaming and trying to hold on as the thing chattered and chattered and bit, its tail or whatever it was flexing and tightening around Beaver's waist, pulling Beaver's shirt out of his overalls and then slithering inside against his bare skin, Beaver's feet jerking on the tiles, the heels of his boots spraying bloody water in thin sheets, his shadow flailing on the wall, and that mossy stuff was everywhere now, it grew so fucking fast -

Jonesy saw Beaver thrash backward in a final throe; saw the thing let go its grip and leap clear just as the Beav rolled off the toilet, his upper half falling into the tub on top of McCarthy, old Mr Behold-I-Stand-at-the-Door-and-Knock. The thing hit the floor and slithered around - Christ, it was quick - and started toward him. Jonesy took a step backward and swept the bathroom door shut just before the thing hit it, making a thump almost exactly like the one it had made when it hit the underside of the toilet seat. It hit hard enough to shiver the door against the jamb. Light flickered in shutters from beneath the door as it moved restlessly on the tiles, and then it slammed into the door again. Jonesy's first thought was to run and get a chair, put it under the doorknob, but how dumb was that, as his kids said, how fucking brainless, the door opened in, not out. The real question was whether the thing understood the function of the doorknob, and if it could reach it.

As if it had read his mind - and who could say that was impossible? - there was a slithering sound on the other side of the door and he felt the doorknob trying to turn, Whatever the thing was, it was incredibly strong. Jonesy had been holding the knob with his right hand; now he added his left, as well. There was a bad moment when the pressure on the knob continued to mount, when he felt sure the thing in there would be able to turn the knob in spite of his doubled grip, and Jonesy almost panicked, almost turned and ran.

What stopped him was his memory of how quick it was. It'd run me down before I could get halfway across the room, he thought, wondering in the back of his mind why the room had to be so goddam big in the first place. It'd run me down, go up my leg, and then right up my -

Jonesy redoubled his grip on the doorknob, cords standing out on his forearms and on the sides of his neck, lips skinned back to show his teeth. His hip hurt, too. His goddam hip, if he did try to run his hip would slow him down even more thanks to the retired professor, fucking elderly asshole shouldn't have been driving in the first place, thanks a lot, prof, thanks a fucking pantload, and if he couldn't hold the door shut and he couldn't run, what then?

What had happened to Beaver, of course. It had had the Beav's nose stuck in its teeth like a shish kebab.

Moaning, Jonesy held the knob. For a moment the pressure increased even more, and then it stopped. From behind the thin wood of the door, the thing yammered angrily. Jonesy could smell the ethery aroma of starter fluid.

How was it holding on in there? It had no limbs, not that Jonesy had been able to see, just that reddish tail-thing, so how -

He heard the minute crackle-crunch-splinter of wood on the other side of the door, directly in front of his own head by the sound, and knew. It was clinging by its teeth. The idea filled Jonesy with unreasoning horror. That thing had been inside McCarthy, he had absolutely no doubt of it. Inside McCarthy and growing like a giant tapeworm in a horror movie. Like a cancer, one with teeth. And when it had grown enough, when it was ready to go to bigger and better things, you might say, it had simply chewed its way out.

'No, man, no,' Jonesy said in a watery, almost weeping voice.

The knob of the bathroom door began trying to turn the other way. Jonesy could see it in there, on its side of the bathroom door, battened to the wood like a leech with its teeth, its tall or single tentacle wrapped around the doorknob like a loop ending in a hangman's noose, pulling -

'No, no, no,' Jonesy panted, hanging onto the knob with all of his strength. It was on the verge of slipping away from him. There was sweat on his face and on his Palms, too, he could feel it.

In front of his bulging, frightened eyes, a constellation of bumps appeared in the wood. Those were where its teeth were planted and working deeper all the time. Soon the points would burst through (if he didn't lose his grip on the doorknob first, that was) and he'd actually have to look at the fangs that had torn his friend's nose off his face.

That brought it home to him: Beaver was dead. His old friend.

'You killed him!' Jonesy cried at the thing on the other side of the door. His voice quivered with sorrow and terror. 'You killed the Beav!'

His cheeks were hot, the tears which now began to course down them even hotter. Beaver in his black leather jacket (What a lot of zippers! Duddits's Mom had said on the day they met her), Beaver next door to shitfaced at the Senior Prom and dancing like a Cossack, arms folded across his chest and his feet kicking, Beaver at Jonesy and Carla's wedding reception, hugging Jonesy and whispering fiercely in his ear, 'You got to be happy, man. You got to be happy for all of us.' And that had been the first he knew that Beaver wasn't - Henry and Peter, of course, about them there had never been a question, but the Beav? And now Beaver was dead, Beaver was lying half in and half out of the tub, lying noseless on top of Mr Richard Fucking I-Stand-at-the-Door-and-Knock McCarthy.

'You killed him, you fuck!' he shouted at the bulges in the door - there had been six of them and now there were nine, hell, a dozen.

As if surprised by his rage, the widdershins pressure on the doorknob eased again. Jonesy looked around wildly for anything that might help him, saw nothing, then looked down. The roll of friction tape was there. He might be able to bend and snatch it up, but then what? He would need both hands to pull lengths of tape off it, both hands and his teeth to rip them, and even supposing the thing gave him time, what was the good of it, when he could barely hold the doorknob still against its pressure?

And now the knob began to turn again. Jonesy held it on his side, but he was getting tired now, the adrenaline in his muscles starting to decay and turn to lead, his palms more slippery than ever, and that smell the ethery smell, was clearer now and somehow purer, untainted by the wastes and gases of McCarthy's body, and how could it be so strong on this side of the door? How could it unless -

In the half-second or so before the rod connecting the doorknobs on the inside and outside of the bathroom door snapped, Jonesy became aware that it was darker now. just a little. As if someone had crept up behind him, was standing between him and the light, him and the back door -

The rod snapped. The knob in Jonesy's hand pulled free and the bathroom door immediately swung in a little, pulled by the weight of the eelish thing clinging to it. Jonesy shrieked and dropped the knob. It hit the roll of tape and bounced askew.

He turned to run and there stood a gray man.

He - it - was a stranger, but in a way no stranger at all. Jonesy had seen representations of him on a hundred 'Weird mysteries' TV shows, on the front pages of a thousand tabloid newspapers (the kind that shouted their serio-comic horrors at you as you stood prisoner in the supermarket checkout lanes), in movies like ET and Close Encounters and Fire in the Sky; Mr Gray who was an X-Files staple.

All the images had gotten the eyes night, at least, those huge black eyes that were just like the eyes of the thing that had chewed its way out of McCarthy's ass, and the mouth was close - a vestigial slit, no more than that - but its gray skin hung in loose folds and swags, like the skin of an elephant dying of old age. From the wrinkles there ran listless yellow-white streams of some pussy substance; the same stuff ran like tears from the comers of its expressionless eyes. Clots and smears of it puddled across the floor of the big room, across the Navajo rug beneath the dreamcatcher, back toward the kitchen door through which it had entered. How long had Mr Gray been there? Had he been outside, watching Jonesy run from the snowmobile shed to the back door with the useless roll of friction tape in his hand?

He didn't know. He only knew that Mr Gray was dying, and Jonesy had to get past him because the thing in the bathroom had just dropped onto the floor with a heavy thud. It would be coming for him.

Marcy, Mr Gray said.

He spoke with perfect clarity, although the vestige of a mouth never moved. Jonesy heard the word in the middle of his head, in the same precise place where he had always heard Duddits's crying.

'What do you want?'

The thing in the bathroom slithered across his feet, but Jonesy barely noticed it. Barely noticed it curl between the bare, toeless feet of the gray man.

Please stop, Mr Gray said inside Jonesy's head. It was the click. More; it was the line. Sometimes you saw the line; sometimes you heard it, as he had heard the run of Defuniak's guilty thoughts that time. I can't stand it, give me a shot, where's Marcy?

Death looking for me that day, Jonesy thought. Missed me in the street, missed me in the hospital - if only by a room or two - been looking ever since. Finally found me.

And then the thing's head exploded, tore wide open, releasing a red-orange cloud of ether - smelling particles.

Jonesy breathed them in.