What Ralph saw then would haunt his dreams for years to come. The left half of the outsider’s head caved in as if it had been made of papier-maché rather than bone. The brown eye jumped in its socket. The thing went to its knees, and its face seemed to liquefy. Ralph saw a hundred features slide across it in mere seconds, there and gone: high foreheads followed low ones, bushy eyebrows and ones so blond they were hardly there, deepset eyes and ones that bulged, lips both wide and thin. Buck teeth protruded, then disappeared; chins jutted and sank. Yet the last face, the one that lingered longest, almost certainly the outsider’s true face, was utterly nondescript. It was the face of anyone you might pass on the street, seen at one moment and forgotten the next.
Holly swung again, striking the cheekbone this time and driving the forgettable face into a hideous crescent. It looked like something out of an insane children’s book.
In the end, it’s nothing, Ralph thought. Nobody. What looked like Claude, what looked like Terry, what looked like Heath Holmes . . . nothing. Only false fronts. Only stage dressing.
Reddish wormlike things began to pour from the hole in the outsider’s head, from its nose, from the cramped teardrop which was all that remained of its unsteady mouth. The worms fell to the stone floor of the Chamber of Sound in a squirming flood. Claude Bolton’s body first began to tremble, then to buck, then to shrivel inside its clothes.
Holly dropped the flashlight and raised the white thing over her head （it was a sock, Ralph saw, a man’s long white athletic sock）， now holding it in both hands. She brought it down one final time, crashing it into the top of the thing’s head. Its face split down the middle like a rotted gourd. There was no brain in the cavity thus revealed, only a writhing nest of those worms, inescapably reminding Ralph of the maggots he had discovered in that long-ago cantaloupe. Those already released were squirming across the floor toward Holly’s feet.
She backed away from them, ran into Ralph, then buckled at the knees. He grabbed her and held her up. All the color had left her face. Tears spilled down her cheeks.
“Drop the sock,” he said in her ear.
She looked at him, dazed.
“Some of those things are on it.”
When she still did nothing but look at him with a kind of dazed wonder, Ralph attempted to pull it from her fist. At first he couldn’t. She had it in a death grip. He pried at her fingers, hoping he wouldn’t have to break them to make her let go, but he would if he had to. If that was what it took. Those things would be a lot worse than poison ivy if they touched her. And if they got under her skin . . .
She seemed to come back to herself—a little, anyway—and opened her hand. The sock dropped, the toe making a clunking sound when it hit the stone floor. He backed away from the worms, which were still blindly seeking （or maybe not blind at all; they were coming right for the two of them）， pulling Holly by the hand, which was still curled from the fierce grip she’d had on the sock. She looked down, saw the danger, and drew in a breath.
“Don’t scream,” he told her. “Can’t risk anything else falling down. Just climb.”
He began to pull her up the stairs. After the first four or five she was able to climb on her own, but they were going backward in order to keep an eye on the worms, which were still spilling from the outsider’s cloven head. Also from the teardrop mouth.
“Stop,” she whispered. “Stop, look at them, they’re just milling around. They can’t get up the steps. And they’re starting to die.”
She was right. They were slowing down, and a great heap of them near the outsider wasn’t moving at all. But the body was; somewhere inside it, the animating force was still trying to live. The Bolton-thing humped and jerked, arms waving in a kind of semaphore. As they watched, the neck shortened. The remains of the head began to draw into the collar of the shirt. Claude Bolton’s black hair at first stuck up, then was gone.
“What is it?” Holly whispered. “What are they?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Ralph said. “I only know that you’ll never have to buy a drink for the rest of your life, at least when you’re with me.”
“I rarely drink alcohol,” she said. “It goes badly with my medicine. I think I told you tha—”
She abruptly leaned over the rail and vomited. He held her while she did it.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be. Let’s—”
“Get the frack out of here,” she finished for him.