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Sitting up in bed, his cheeks still flushed with heat (but his fever, like the Kenduskeag, finally receding), Bill had finished the boat — but when George reached for it, Bill held it out of reach. 'N-Now get me the p-p-paraffin.'

'What's that? Where is it?'

'It's on the cellar shuh-shuh-shelf as you go d-downstairs,' Bill said. 'In a box that says

Guh-Guh-hulf . . . Gulf. Bring that to me, and a knife, and a b-bowl. And a puh-pack of muhmuh-matches.'

George had gone obediently to get these things. He could hear his mother playing the piano, not Für Elise now but something else he didn't like so well — something that sounded dry and fussy; he could hear rain flicking steadily against the kitchen windows. These were https://www.8freebooks.com comfortable sounds, but the thought of the cellar was not a bit comfortable. He did not like the cellar, and he did not like going down the cellar stairs, because he always imagined there was something down there in the dark. That was silly, of course, his father said so and his mother said so and, even more important, Bill said so, but still —

He did not even like opening the door to flick on the light because he always had the idea

— this was so exquisitely stupid he didn't dare tell anyone — that while he was feeling for the light switch, some horrible clawed paw would settle lightly over his wrist . . . and then jerk him down into the darkness that smelled of dirt and wet and dim rotted vegetables.

Stupid! There were no things with claws, all hairy and full of killing spite. Every now and then someone went crazy and killed a lot of people — sometimes Chet Huntley told about such things on the evening news — and of course there were Commies, but there was no weirdo monster living down in their cellar. Still, this idea lingered. In those interminable moments while he was groping for the switch with his right hand (his left arm curled around the doorjamb in a deathgrip), that cellar smell seemed to intensify until it filled the world.

Smells of dirt and wet and long-gone vegetables would merge into one unmistakable ineluctable smell, the smell of the monster, the apotheosis of all monsters. It was the smell of something for which he had no name: the smell of It, crouched and lurking and ready to spring. A creature which would eat anything but which was especially hungry for boymeat.