A Tale from the Summer of ’58
They weren’t all found. No; they weren’t all found. And from time to time wrong assumptions were made.
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From the Derry News, June 21st, 1958 (page 1):
MISSING BOY PROMPTS NEW FEARS
Edward L. Corcoran, of 73 Charter Street, Derry, was reported missing last night by his mother, Monica Macklin, and his stepfather, Richard P.
Macklin. The Corcoran boy is ten. His disappearance has prompted new fears that Derry’s young people are being stalked by a killer.
Mrs. Macklin said the boy had been missing since June 19th, when he failed to return home from school after the last day of classes before summer vacation.
When asked why they had delayed over twenty-four hours before reporting their son’s absence, Mr. and Mrs. Macklin refused comment. Police Chief Richard Borton also declined comment, but a Police
Department source told the News that the Corcoran boy’s relationship with his stepfather was not a good one, and that he had spent nights out of the
house before. The source speculated that the boy’s final grades may have played a part in the boy’s failure to turn up. Derry School Superintendent Harold Metcalf declined comment on the Corcoran boy’s grades, pointing out they are not a matter of public record.
“I hope the disappearance of this boy will not cause unnecessary fears, ” Chief Borton said last night. “The mood of the community is understandably uneasy, but I want to emphasize that we log thirty to fifty missing-persons reports on minors each and every year. Most turn up alive and well within a week of the initial report. This will be the case with Edward Corcoran, God willing. ”
Borton also reiterated his conviction that the murders of George Denbrough, Betty Ripsom, Cheryl Lamonica, Matthew Clements, and Veronica Grogan were not the work of one person. “There are essential
differences in each crime, ” Borton said, but declined to elaborate. He said that local police, working in close co-operation with the Maine State Attorney General’s office, are still following up a number of leads. Asked in a telephone interview last night how good these leads are, Chief Borton replied: “Very good. ” Asked if an arrest in any of the crimes was expected soon, Borton declined comment.
From the Derry News, June 22nd, 1958 (page 1):
COURT ORDERS SURPRISE EXHUMATION
In a bizarre new twist to the disappearance of Edward Corcoran, Derry District Court Judge Erhardt K. Moulton ordered the exhumation of Corcoran’s younger brother, Dorsey, late yesterday. The court order followed a joint request from the County Attorney and the County Medical Examiner.
Dorsey Corcoran, who also lived with his mother and stepfather at 73 Charter Street, died of what were reported to be accidental causes in May of 1957. The boy was brought into the Derry Home Hospital suffering from
multiple fractures, including a fractured skull. Richard P. Macklin, the boy’s stepfather, was the admitting person. He stated that Dorsey Corcoran had been playing on a stepladder in the garage and had apparently fallen from
the top. The boy died without recovering consciousness three days later.
Edward Corcoran, ten, was reported missing late Wednesday. Asked if either Mr. or Mrs. Macklin was under suspicion in either the younger boy’s death or the older boy’s disappearance, Chief Richard Borton declined comment.
From the Derry News, June 24th, 1958 (page 1):
MACKLIN ARRESTED IN BEATING DEATH
Under Suspicion in Unsolved Disappearance
Chief Richard Borton of the Derry Police called a news conference yesterday to announce that Richard P. Macklin, of 73 Charter Street, had been arrested and charged with the murder of his stepson, Dorsey Corcoran.
The Corcoran boy died in Derry Home Hospital of reported “accidental causes” on May 31st of last year.
“The medical examiner’s report shows that the boy was badly beaten, ” Borton said. Although Macklin claimed the boy had fallen from a stepladder while playing in the garage, Borton said the County Medical Examiner’s report showed that Dorsey Corcoran was severely beaten with some blunt instrument. When asked what sort of instrument, Borton said:
“It might have been a hammer. Right now the important thing is the medical examiner’s conclusion that this boy was struck repeated blows with some object hard enough to break his bones. The wounds, particularly those in
the skull, are not at all consistent with those which might be incurred in a fall. Dorsey Corcoran was beaten within an inch of his life and then dumped off at the Home Hospital emergency room to die. ”
Asked if the doctors who treated the Corcoran boy might have been derelict in their duty when it came to reporting either an incidence of child abuse or the actual cause of death, Borton said, “They will have serious
questions to answer when Mr. Macklin comes to trial. ”
Asked for an opinion on how these developments might bear on the recent disappearance of Dorsey Corcoran’s older brother, Edward, reported missing by Richard and Monica Macklin four days ago, Chief Borton answered: “I think it looks much more serious than we first supposed, don’t you? ”
From the Derry News, June 25th, 1958 (page 2):
TEACHER SAYS EDWARD CORCORAN “OFTEN BRUISED”
Henrietta Dumont, who teaches fifth grade at Derry Elementary School on Jackson Street, said that Edward Corcoran, who has now been missing for nearly a week, often came to school “covered with bruises. ” Mrs. Dumont, who has taught one of Derry’s two fifth-grade classes since the end of World War II, said that the Corcoran boy came to school one day about
three weeks before his disappearance “with both eyes nearly closed shut. When I asked him what happened, he said his father had ‘taken him up’ for not eating his supper. ”
When asked why she had not reported a beating of such obvious severity, Mrs. Dumont said, “This isn’t the first time I’ve seen such a thing as this in my career as a teacher. The first few times I had a student with a parent who was confusing beatings with discipline, I tried to do something about it. I
was told by the assistant principal, Gwendolyn Rayburn in those days, to stay out of it. She told me that when school employees get involved in cases of suspected child abuse, it always comes back to haunt the School Department at tax appropriation time. I went to the principal and he told me to forget it or I would be reprimanded. I asked him if a reprimand in a matter like that would go on my record. He said a reprimand did not have to be on a teacher’s record. I got the message. ”
Asked if the attitude in the Derry school system remained the same now,
Mrs. Dumont said, “Well, what does it look like, in light of this current situation? And I might add that I would not be speaking to you now if I hadn’t retired at the end of this school year. ”
Mrs. Dumont went on, “Since this thing came out I get down on my knees every night and pray that Eddie Corcoran just got fed up with that
beast of a stepfather and ran away. I pray that when he reads in the paper or hears on the news that Macklin has been locked up, Eddie will come home. ”
In a brief telephone interview Monica Macklin hotly refuted Mrs. Dumont’s charges. “Rich never beat Dorsey, and he never beat Eddie, either, ” she said. “I’m telling you that right now, and when I die I’ll stand at the Throne of Judgment and look God right in the eye and tell Him the same thing. ”
From the Derry News, June 28th, 1958 (page 2):
“DADDY HAD TO TAKE ME UP ‘CAUSE I’M BAD, ” TOT TOLD NURSERY TEACHER BEFORE
BEATING DEATH
A local nursery-school teacher who declined to be identified told a
Newsreporter yesterday that young Dorsey Corcoran came to his twice- weekly nursery-school class with bad sprains of his right thumb and three
fingers of his right hand less than a week before his death in a purported garage accident.
“It was hurting him enough so that the poor little guy couldn’t color his Mr. Do safety poster, ” the teacher said. “The fingers were swelled up like sausages. When I asked Dorsey what happened, he said that his father (stepfather Richard P. Macklin) had bent his fingers back because he had walked across a floor his mother had just washed and waxed. ‘Daddy had to take me up ‘cause I’m bad’ was the way he put it. I felt like crying, looking at his poor, dear fingers. He really wanted to color his poster like the other children, so I gave him some baby aspirin and let him color while the others were having Story Time. He loved to color the Mr. Do posters—that was what he liked best—and now I’m so glad I was able to help him have a little happiness that day.
“When he died it never crossed my mind to think it was anything but an accident. I guess at first I thought he must have fallen because he couldn’t grip very well with that hand. Now I think I just couldn’t believe an adult could do such a thing to a little person. I know better now. I wish to God I didn’t. ”
Dorsey Corcoran’s older brother, Edward, ten, is still missing. From his cell in Derry County Jail, Richard Macklin continues to deny any part in either the death of his younger stepson or the disappearance of the older boy.
From the Derry News, June 30th, 1958 (page 5):
MACKLIN QUESTIONED IN DEATHS OF GROGAN, CLEMENTS
Produces Unshakable Alibis, Source Claims From the Derry News, July 6th, 1958 (page 1):
MACKLIN TO BE CHARGED ONLY WITH MURDER OF STEPSON DORSEY, BORTON SAYS
Edward Corcoran Still Missing From the Derry News, July 24th, 1958 (page 1):
WEEPING STEPFATHER CONFESSES TO BLUDGEON DEATH OF STEPSON
In a dramatic development in the District Court trial of Richard Macklin for the murder of his stepson Dorsey Corcoran, Macklin broke down under the stem cross-examination of County Attorney Bradley Whitsun and admitted he had beaten the four-year-old boy to death with a recoilless hammer, which he then buried at the far end of his wife’s vegetable garden before taking the boy to Derry Home Hospital’s emergency room.
The courtroom was stunned and silent as the sobbing Macklin, who had previously admitted beating both of his stepsons “occasionally, if they had it coming, for their own good, ” poured out his story.
“I don’t know what came over me. I saw he was climbing on the damn ladder again and I grabbed the hammer from the bench where it was laying and I just started to use it on him. I didn’t mean to kill him. With God as my witness I never meant to kill him. ”
“Did he say anything to you before he passed out? ” Whitsun asked. “He said, ‘Stop daddy, I’m sorry, I love you, ’ Macklin replied. “Did you stop? ”
“Eventually, ” Macklin said. He then began to weep in such a hysterical manner that Judge Erhardt Moulton declared the court in recess.
From the Derry News, September 18th, 1958 (page 16):
WHERE IS EDWARD CORCORAN?
His stepfather, sentenced to a term of two to ten years in Shawshank State Prison for the murder of his four-year-old brother, Dorsey, continues to claim he has no idea where Edward Corcoran is. His mother, who has instituted divorce proceedings against Richard P. Macklin, says she thinks her soon-to-be ex-husband is lying. Is he?
“I, for one, really don’t think so, ” says Father Ashley O’Brian, who serves the Catholic prisoners at Shawshank. Macklin began taking
instruction in the Catholic faith shortly after beginning his prison term, and Father O’Brian has spent a good deal of time with him. “He is sincerely sorry for what he has done, ” Father O’Brian goes on, adding that when he initially asked Macklin why he wanted to be a Catholic, Macklin replied, “I hear they have an act of contrition and I need to do a lot of that or else I’ll go to hell when I die. ”
“He knows what he did to the younger boy, ” Father O’Brian said. “If he also did something to the older one, he doesn’t remember it. As far as
Edward goes, he believes his hands are clean. ”
How clean Macklin’s hands are in the matter of his stepson Edward is a question which continues to trouble Derry residents, but he has been convincingly cleared of the other child-murders which have taken place here. He was able to produce ironclad alibis for the first three, and he was in jail when seven others were committed in late June, July, and August.
All ten murders remain unsolved.
In an exclusive interview with the News last week Macklin again asserted that he knows nothing of Edward Corcoran’s whereabouts. “I beat them both, ” he said in a painful monologue which was often halted by bouts of weeping. “I loved them but I beat them. I don’t know why, any more than I know why Monica let me, or why she covered up for me after Dorsey died. I guess I could have killed Eddie as easy as I did Dorsey, but I swear before God and Jesus and all the saints of heaven that I didn’t. I know how it looks, but I didn’t do it. I think he just ran away. If he did, that’s one thing
I’ve got to thank God for. ”
Asked if he is aware of any gaps in his memory—if he could have killed Edward and then blocked it out of his mind—Macklin replied: “I ain’t
aware of any gaps. I know only too well what I did. I’ve given my life to Christ, and I’m going to spend the rest of it trying to make up for it. ”
From the Derry News, January 27th, 1960 (page 1):
BODY NOT THAT OF CORCORAN YOUTH, BORTON ANNOUNCES
Police Chief Richard Borton told reporters early today that the badly decomposed body of a boy about the age of Edward Corcoran, who disappeared from his Derry home in June of 1958, is definitely not that of the missing youth. The body was found in Aynesford, Massachusetts, buried in a gravel pit. Both Maine and Massachusetts State Police at first
theorized that the body might be that of the Corcoran boy, believing that he might have been picked up by a child molester after running away from the Charter Street home where his younger brother had been beaten and killed.
Dental charts showed conclusively that the boy found in Aynesford was not that of the Corcoran youth, who has now been missing for nineteen months.
From the Portland Press-Herald, July 19th, 1967 (page 3):
CONVICTED MURDERER COMMITS SUICIDE IN FALMOUTH
Richard P. Macklin, who was convicted of the murder of his four-year-old stepson nine years ago, was found dead in his small third-floor Falmouth apartment late yesterday afternoon. The parolee, who had lived and worked quietly in Falmouth since his release from Shawshank State Prison in 1964, was an apparent suicide.
“The note he left indicates an extremely confused state of mind, ”
Assistant Falmouth Police Chief Brandon K. Roche said. He refused to
divulge the note’s contents, but a Police Department source said it consisted of two sentences: “I saw Eddie last night. He was dead. ”
The “Eddie” referred to may well have been Macklin’s stepson, brother of the boy Macklin was convicted of killing in 1958. It was the
disappearance of Edward Corcoran which eventually led to Macklin’s conviction for the beating death of Edward’s younger brother, Dorsey. The elder boy has been missing for nine years. In a brief court proceeding in 1966 the boy’s mother had her son declared legally dead so she could enter into possession of Edward Corcoran’s savings account. The account contained a sum of sixteen dollars.
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Eddie Corcoran was dead, all right.
He died on the night of June 19th, and his stepfather had nothing at all to do with it. He died as Ben Hanscom sat home watching TV with his mother, as Eddie Kaspbrak’s mother anxiously felt Eddie’s forehead for signs of her favorite ailment, “phantom fever, ” as Beverly Marsh’s stepfather—a gent who bore, in temperament at least, a remarkable resemblance to Eddie and Dorsey Corcoran’s stepfather—lifted a high-stepping kick into the girl’s
derrière and told her “to get out there and dry those goddam dishes like your mummer told you, ” as Mike Hanlon got yelled at by some high- school boys (one of whom would some years later sire that fine upstanding young homophobe John “Webby” Garton) passing in an old Dodge while Mike pulled weeds out of the garden beside the small Hanlon home out on Witcham Road, not far from the farm owned by Henry Bowers’s crazy
father, as Richie Tozier was sneaking a look at the half-undressed girls in a copy of Gem he had found at the bottom of his father’s socks-and- underwear drawer and getting a regular good boner, and as Bill Denbrough was throwing his dead brother’s photograph album across the room in horrified unbelief.
Although none of them would remember doing so later, all of them looked up at the exact moment Eddie Corcoran died . . . as if hearing some distant cry.
The News had been absolutely right about one thing: Eddie’s rank-card was just bad enough to make him afraid to go home and face his stepdad. Also, his mother and the old man were fighting a lot this month. That made things even worse. When they got going at it hot and heavy, his mother shouted a lot of mostly incoherent accusations. His stepdad responded to
these first with grunts, then yells to shut up, and finally with the enraged bellows of a boar which has gotten a quiver of porcupine needles in its
snout. Eddie had never seen the old man use his fists on her, though. Eddie didn’t think he quite dared. He had saved his fists for Eddie and Dorsey in the old days, and now that Dorsey was dead, Eddie got his little brother’s
share as well as his own.
These shouting matches came and went in cycles. They were most common at the end of the month, when the bills came in. A policeman, called by a neighbor, might drop by once or twice when things were at their worst and tell them to tone it down. Usually that ended it. His mother was apt to give the cop the finger and dare him to take her in, but his stepdad rarely said boo.
His stepdad was afraid of the cops, Eddie thought.
He lay low during these periods of stress. It was wiser. If you didn’t think so, just look at what had happened to Dorsey. Eddie didn’t know the
specifics and didn’t want to, but he had an idea about Dorsey. He thought that Dorsey had been in the wrong place at the wrong time: the garage on the last day of the month. They told Eddie that Dorsey fell off the
stepladder in the garage—“If I told him once to stay off’n it I told him sixty times, ” his stepdad had said—but his mother wouldn’t look at him except by accident. . . and when their eyes did meet, Eddie had seen a frightened ratty little gleam in hers that he didn’t like. The old man just sat there silently at the kitchen table with a quart of Rheingold, looking at nothing
from beneath his heavy lowering eyebrows. Eddie kept out of his reach. When his stepfather was bellowing, he was usually—not always but usually
—all right. It was when he stopped that you had to be careful.
Two nights ago he had thrown a chair at Eddie when Eddie got up to see what was on the other TV channel—just picked up one of the tubular aluminum kitchen chairs, swept it back over his head, and let fly. It hit
Eddie in the butt and knocked him over. His butt still ached, but he knew it could have been worse: it could have been his head.
Then there had been the night when the old man had suddenly gotten up and rubbed a handful of mashed potatoes into Eddie’s hair for no reason at all. One day last September, Eddie had come in from school and foolishly allowed the screen door to slam shut behind him while his stepdad was taking a nap. Macklin came out of the bedroom in his billowy boxer shorts, hair standing up in corkscrews, cheeks grizzled with two days of weekend beard, breath grizzled with two days of weekend beer. “There now, Eddie, ” he said, “I got to take you up for slammin that fuckin door. ” In Rich Macklin’s lexicon, “taking you up” was a euphemism for “beating the shit out of you. ” Which was what he then did to Eddie. Eddie had lost
consciousness when the old man threw him into the front hall. His mother had mounted a pair of low coathooks out there, especially for him and Dorsey to hang their coats on. These hooks had rammed hard steel fingers into Eddie’s lower back, and that was when he passed out. When he came to ten minutes later he heard his mother yelling that she was going to take
Eddie to the hospital and he couldn’t stop her.
“After what happened to Dorsey? ” his stepdad had responded. “You want to go to jail, woman? ”
That was the end of her talk about the hospital. She helped Eddie into his room, where he lay shivering on his bed, his forehead beaded with sweat.
The only time he left the room during the next three days was when they were both gone. Then he would hobble slowly into the kitchen, groaning
softly, and get his stepdad’s whiskey from under the sink. A few nips dulled the pain. The pain was mostly gone by the fifth day, but he had pissed blood for almost two weeks.
And the hammer wasn’t in the garage anymore.
What about that? What about that, friends and neighbors?
Oh, the Craftsman hammer—the ordinary hammer—was still there. It
was the Scotti recoilless which was missing. His stepdad’s special hammer, the one he and Dorsey had been forbidden to touch. “If one of you touches that baby, ” he had told them the day he bought it, “you’ll both be wearing your guts for earmuffs. ” Dorsey had asked timidly if that hammer was very expensive. The old man told him he was damn tooting. He said it was filled with ballbearings and you couldn’t make it bounce back up no matter how hard you brought it down.
Now it was gone.
Eddie’s grades weren’t the best because he had missed a lot of school since his mother’s remarriage, but he was not a stupid boy by any means.
He thought he knew what had happened to the Scotti recoilless hammer. He thought maybe his stepfather had used it on Dorsey and then buried it in the garden or maybe thrown it in the Canal. It was the sort of thing that happened frequently in the horror comics Eddie read, the ones he kept on
the top shelf of his closet.
He walked closer to the Canal, which rippled between its concrete sides like oiled silk. A swatch of moonlight glimmered across its dark surface in a boomerang shape. He sat down, swinging his sneakers idly against the
concrete in an irregular tattoo. The last six weeks had been quite dry and the water flowed past perhaps nine feet below the worn soles of his sneakers.
But if you looked closely at the Canal’s sides, you could read the various levels to which it sometimes rose quite easily. The concrete was stained a dark brown just above the water’s current level. This brown stain slowly
faded to yellow, then to a color that was almost white at the level where the heels of Eddie’s sneakers made contact when he swung them.
The water flowed smoothly and silently out of a concrete arch that was cobbled on the inside, past the place where Eddie sat, and then down to the covered wooden footbridge between Bassey Park and Derry High School. The bridge’s sides and plank footing—even the beams under the roof—
were covered with an intaglio of initials, phone numbers, and declarations. Declarations of love; declarations that So-and-so was willing to “suck” or “blow”; declarations that those discovered sucking or blowing would lose their foreskins or have their assholes plugged with hot tar; occasional
eccentric declarations that defied definition. One that Eddie had puzzled
over all this spring read SAVE RUSSIAN JEWS! COLLECT VALUABLE PRIZES!
What, exactly, did that mean? Anything? And did it matter?
Eddie didn’t go into the Kissing Bridge tonight; he had no urge to cross over to the high-school side. He thought he would probably sleep in the park, maybe in the dead leaves under the bandstand, but for now it was fine just to sit here. He liked it in the park, and came often when he had to think. Sometimes there were people making out in the groves of trees which dotted the park, but Eddie left them alone and they left him alone. He had heard lurid stories in the playground at school about the queers that cruised in Bassey Park after sundown, and he accepted these stories without question, but he himself had never been bothered. The park was a peaceful place, and he thought the best part of it was right here where he was sitting. He liked it in the middle of summer, when the water was so low it chuckled over the stones and actually broke up into isolated streamlets that twisted and turned and sometimes came together again. He liked it in late March or early April, just after ice-out, when he would sometimes stand by the Canal (too cold to sit then; your ass would freeze) for an hour or more, the hood of his old parka, now two years too small for him, pulled up, his hands plunged into his pockets, unaware that his skinny body was shivering and shaking. The Canal had a terrible, irresistible power in the week or two after the ice went out. He was fascinated by the way the water boiled whitely out of the cobbled arch and roared past him, bearing sticks and branches and all manner of human trash along with it. More than once he had envisioned walking beside the Canal in March with his stepdad and giving the bastard a great big motherfucking push. He would scream and fall in, his arms pinwheeling for balance, and Eddie would stand on the concrete parapet and watch him carried off downstream, his head a black bobbing shape in
the middle of the unruly whitecapped current. He would stand there, yes, and he would cup his hands around his mouth and scream: THAT WAS FOR DORSEY, YOU ROTTEN COCKSUCKER! WHEN YOU GET DOWN TO HELL TELL THE DEVIL THE LAST THING YOU EVER HEARD WAS ME TELLING YOU TO PICK ON SOMEBODY YOUR OWN SIZE! It would
never happen, of course, but it was an absolutely grand fantasy. A grand dream to dream as you sat here by the Canal, a g—
A hand closed around Eddie’s foot.
He had been looking across the Canal toward the school, smiling a sleepy and rather beautiful smile as he imagined his stepfather being carried off in the violent rip of the spring runoff, being carried out of his life forever. The soft yet strong grip startled him so much that he almost lost his balance and tumbled into the Canal.
It’s one of the queers the big kids are always talking about, he thought, and then he looked down. His mouth dropped open. Urine spilled hotly down his legs and stained his jeans black in the moonlight. It wasn’t a queer.
It was Dorsey.
It was Dorsey as he had been buried, Dorsey in his blue blazer and gray pants, only now the blazer was in muddy tatters, Dorsey’s shirt was yellow rags, Dorsey’s pants clung wetly to legs as thin as broomsticks. And Dorsey’s head was horribly slumped, as if it had been caved in at the back and consequently pushed up in the front.
Dorsey was grinning.
“Eddieeeee, ” his dead brother croaked, just like one of the dead people who were always coming back from the grave in the horror comics.
Dorsey’s grin widened. Yellow teeth gleamed, and somewhere way back in that darkness things seemed to be squirming.
“Eddieeee. . . I came to see you Eddieeeeee. ”
Eddie tried to scream. Waves of gray shock rolled over him, and he had the curious sensation that he was floating. But it was not a dream; he was awake. The hand on his sneaker was as white as a trout’s belly. His brother’s bare feet clung somehow to the concrete. Something had bitten one of Dorsey’s heels off.
“Come on down Eddieeeee. ”
Eddie couldn’t scream. His lungs didn’t have enough air in them to manage a scream. He got out a curious reedy moaning sound. Anything
louder seemed beyond him. That was all right. In a second or two his mind would snap and after that nothing would matter. Dorsey’s hand was small but implacable. Eddie’s buttocks were sliding over the concrete to the edge of the Canal.
Still making that reedy moaning sound, he reached behind himself and grabbed the concrete edging and yanked himself backward. He felt the hand slide away momentarily, heard an angry hiss, and had time to think: That’s
not Dorsey. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not Dorsey. Then adrenaline flooded his body and he was crawling away, trying to run even before he was on his feet, his breath coming in short shrieky whistles.
White hands appeared on the concrete lip of the Canal. There was a wet slapping sound. Drops of water flew upward in the moonlight from dead pallid skin. Now Dorsey’s face appeared over the edge. Dim red sparks gleamed in his sunken eyes. His wet hair was plastered to his skull. Mud streaked his cheeks like warpaint.
Eddie’s chest finally unlocked. He hitched in breath and turned it into a scream. He got to his feet and ran. He ran looking back over his shoulder, needing to see where Dorsey was, and as a result he ran smack into a large elm tree.
It felt as if someone—his old man, for instance—had set off a dynamite charge in his left shoulder. Stars shot and corkscrewed through his head. He fell at the base of the tree as if poleaxed, blood trickling from his left temple. He swam in the waters of semiconsciousness for perhaps ninety seconds. Then he managed to gain his feet again. A groan escaped him as
he tried to raise his left arm. It didn’t want to come. Felt all numb and far away. So he raised his right and rubbed his fiercely aching head.
Then he remembered why he had happened to run full-tilt into the elm tree in the first place and looked around.
There was the edge of the Canal, white as bone and straight as string in the moonlight. No sign of the thing from the Canal . . . if there ever had been a thing. He continued turning, working his way slowly through a
complete three hundred and sixty degrees. Bassey Park was silent and as still as a black-and-white photograph. Weeping willows draggled their thin
tenebrous arms, and anything could be standing, slumped and insane, within their shelter.
Eddie began to walk, trying to look everywhere at once. His sprained shoulder throbbed in painful sync with his heartbeat.
Eddieeeee, the breeze moaned through the trees, don’t you want to see meeeee, Eddieeeee? He felt flabby corpse-fingers caress the side of his neck. He whirled, his hands going up. As his feet tangled together and he fell, he saw that it had only been willow-fronds moving in the breeze.
He got up again. He wanted to run but when he tried another dynamite charge went off in his shoulder and he had to stop. He knew somehow that
he should be getting over his fright by now, calling himself a stupid little baby who got spooked by a reflection or maybe fell asleep without knowing it and had a bad dream. That wasn’t happening, though; quite the reverse, in fact. His heart was now beating so fast he could no longer distinguish the
separate thuds, and he felt sure it would soon burst in terror. He couldn’t run but when he got out of the willows he did manage a limping jogtrot.
He fixed his eyes on the streetlight that marked the park’s main gate. He headed in that direction, managing a little more speed, thinking: I’ll make it to the light, and that’s all right. I’ll make it to the light, and that’s all right. Bright light, no more fright, up all night, what a sight—
Something was following him.
Eddie could hear it bludgeoning its way through the willow grove. If he turned he would see it. It was gaining. He could hear its feet, a kind of shuffling, squelching stride, but he would not look back, no, he would look ahead at the light, the light was all right, he would just continue his flight to the light, and he was almost there, almost—
The smell was what made him look back. The overwhelming smell, as if fish had been left to rot in a huge pile that had become carrion-slushy in the summer heat. It was the smell of a dead ocean.
It wasn’t Dorsey after him now; it was the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The thing’s snout was long and pleated. Green fluid dripped from black gashes like vertical mouths in its cheeks. Its eyes were white and jellylike. Its webbed fingers were tipped with claws like razors. Its respiration was bubbly and deep, the sound of a diver with a bad regulator. As it saw Eddie looking, its green-black lips wrinkled back from huge fangs in a dead and vacant smile.
It shambled after him, dripping, and Eddie suddenly understood. It meant to take him back to the Canal, to carry him down into the dank blackness of the Canal’s underground passage. To eat him there.
Eddie put on a burst of speed. The arc-sodium light at the gate drew closer. He could see its halo of bugs and moths. A truck went by, headed for Route 2, the driver working his way up through the gears, and it crossed Eddie’s desperate, terrified mind that he could be drinking coffee from a paper cup and listening to a Buddy Holly tune on the radio, completely
unaware that less than two hundred yards away there was a boy who might be dead in another twenty seconds.
The stink. The overwhelming stink of it. Gaining. All around him.
It was a park bench he tripped over. Some kids had casually pushed it over earlier that evening, heading toward their homes at a run to beat the
curfew. Its seat poked an inch or two out of the grass, one shade of green on another, almost invisible in the moon-driven dark. The edge of the seat smacked Eddie in the shins, causing a burst of glassy, exquisite pain. His
legs flipped out behind him and he thumped into the grass.
He looked behind him and saw the Creature bearing down, its white poached-egg eyes glittering, its scales dripping slime the color of seaweed, the gills up and down its bulging neck and cheeks opening and closing.
“Ag!” Eddie croaked. It seemed to be the only noise he could make.
“Ag! Ag! Ag! Ag!”
He crawled now, fingers hooking deep into the turf. His tongue hung out.
In the second before the Creature’s fish-smelling horny hands closed around his throat, a comforting thought came to him: This is a dream; it has to be. There’s no real Creature, no real Black Lagoon, and even if there was, that was in South America or the Florida Everglades or someplace like that. This is only a dream and I’ll wake up in my bed or maybe in the leaves under the bandstand and I—
Then batrachian hands closed around his neck and Eddie’s hoarse cries were choked off; as the Creature turned him over, the chitinous hooks which sprouted from those hands scrawled bleeding marks like calligraphy into his neck. He stared into its glowing white eyes. He felt the webs between its fingers pressing against his throat like constricting bands of living seaweed. His terror-sharpened gaze noted the fin, something like a
rooster’s comb and something like a hornpout’s poisonous backfin, standing atop the Creature’s hunched and plated head. As its hands clamped tight, shutting off his air, he was even able to see the way the white light from the arc-sodium lamp turned a smoky green as it passed through that
membranous headfin.
“You’re . . . not . . . real, ” Eddie choked, but clouds of grayness were closing in now, and he realized faintly that it was real enough, this Creature. It was, after all, killing him.
And yet some rationality remained, even until the end: as the Creature hooked its claws into the soft meat of his neck, as his carotid artery let go in a warm and painless gout that splashed the thing’s reptilian plating, Eddie’s
hands groped at the Creature’s back, feeling for a zipper. They fell away only when the Creature tore his head from his shoulders with a low satisfied grunt.
And as Eddie’s picture of what It was began to fade, It began promptly to change into something else.
4
Unable to sleep, plagued by bad dreams, a boy named Michael Hanlon rose soon after first light on the first full day of summer vacation. The light was pale, bundled up in a low, thick mist that would lift by eight o’clock, taking the wraps off a perfect summer day.
But that was for later. For now the world was all gray and rose, as silent as a cat walking on a carpet.
Mike, dressed in corduroys, a tee-shirt, and black high-topped Keds,
came downstairs, ate a bowl of Wheaties (he didn’t really like Wheaties but had wanted the free prize in the box—a Captain Midnight Magic Decoder Ring), then hopped on his bike and pedaled toward town, riding on the
sidewalks because of the fog. The fog changed everything, made the most ordinary things like fire hydrants and stop-signs into objects of mystery— things both strange and a trifle sinister. You could hear cars but not see them, and because of the fog’s odd acoustic quality, you could not tell if they were far or near until you actually saw them come rolling out of the fog with ghost-halos of moisture ringing their headlamps.
He turned right on Jackson Street, bypassing downtown, and then crossed to Main Street by way of Palmer Lane—and during his short ride down this little byway’s one-block length he passed the house where he would live as an adult. He did not look at it; it was just a small two-story dwelling with a garage and a small lawn. It gave off no special vibration to the passing boy who would spend most of his adult life as its owner and only dweller.
At Main Street he turned right and rode up to Bassey Park, still wandering, simply riding and enjoying the stillness of the early day. Once inside the main gate he dismounted his bike, pushed down the kickstand, and walked toward the Canal. He was still, as far as he knew, impelled by
nothing more than purest whim. Certainly it did not occur to him to think that his dreams of the night before had anything to do with his current course; he did not even remember exactly what his dreams had been—only that one had followed another until he had awakened at five o’clock, sweaty but shivering, and with the idea that he ought to eat a fast breakfast and then take a bike-ride into town.
Here in Bassey there was a smell in the fog he didn’t like: a sea-smell, salty and old. He had smelled it before, of course. In the early-morning fogs you could often smell the ocean in Derry, although the coast was forty miles away. But the smell this morning seemed thicker, more vital. Almost dangerous.
Something caught his eye. He bent down and picked up a cheap two- blade pocket knife. Someone had scratched the initials E. C. on the side. Mike looked at it thoughtfully for a moment or two and then pocketed it. Finders keepers, losers weepers.
He glanced around. Here, near where he had found the knife, was an overturned park bench. He righted it, setting its iron footings back into the holes they had made over a period of months or years. Beyond the bench he saw a matted place in the grass . . . and leading away from it, two grooves. The grass was springing back up, but those grooves were still fairly clear.
They went in the direction of the Canal.
And there was blood.
(the bird remember the bird remember the)
But he did not want to remember the bird and so he pushed the thought away. Dogfight, that’s all. One of em must have hurt the other one pretty bad. It was a convincing thought by which he was somehow not convinced. Thoughts of the bird kept wanting to come back—the one he had seen out at the Kitchener Ironworks, one Stan Uris never would have found in his bird-book.
Stop it. Just get out of here.
But instead of getting out he followed the grooves. As he did he made up a little story in his mind. It was a murder story. Here’s this kid, out late, see.
Out past the curfew. The killer gets him. And how does he get rid of the body? Drags it to the Canal and dumps it in, of course! Just like an Alfred Hitchcock Presents!
The marks he was following could have been made by a dragging pair of shoes or sneakers, he supposed.
Mike shivered and looked around uncertainly. The story was somehow a little too real.
And suppose that it wasn’t a man who did it but a monster. Like out of a horror comic or a horror book or a horror movie or
(a bad dream)
a fairy tale or something.
He decided he didn’t like the story. It was a stupid story. He tried to push it out of his mind but it wouldn’t go. So what? Let it stay. It was dumb.
Riding into town this morning had been dumb. Following these two matted grooves in the grass was dumb. His dad would have a lot of chores for him to do around the place today. He ought to get back and start in or when the hottest part of the afternoon rolled around he would be up the barn loft pitching hay. Yes, he ought to get back. And that’s just what he was going to do.
Sure you are, he thought. Want to bet?
Instead of going back to his bike and getting on and riding home and starting his chores, he followed the grooves in the grass. There were more drops of drying blood here and there. Not much, though. Not as much as
there had been in that matted place back there by the park bench he had set to rights.
Mike could hear the Canal now, running quiet. A moment later he saw the concrete edge materialize out of the fog.
Here was something else in the grass. My goodness, it’s certainly your
day for finding things, his mind said with dubious geniality, and then a gull screamed somewhere and Mike flinched, thinking again of the bird he had seen that day, that day just this spring.
Whatever that is in the grass, I don’t even want to look at it. And that was oh so very true, but here he was, already bending over it, hands planted just above his knees, to see what it was.
A tattered bit of cloth with a drop of blood on it.
The seagull screamed again. Mike stared at the bloody scrap of cloth and remembered what had happened to him in the spring.
5
Each year during April and May the Hanlon farm woke up from its winter doze.
Mike would let himself know that spring had come again not when the first crocuses showed under his mom’s kitchen windows or when kids started bringing immies and croakers to school or even when the Washington Senators kicked off the baseball season (usually getting
themselves shellacked in the process), but only when his father hollered for Mike to help him push their mongrel truck out of the barn. The front half was an old Model-A Ford car, the back end a pick-up truck with a tailgate
which was the remainder of the old henhouse door. If the winter hadn’t been too cold, the two of them could often get it going by pushing it down the driveway. The truck’s cab had no doors; likewise there was no windshield.
The seat was half of an old sofa that Will Hanlon had scrounged from the Derry dump. The stick-shift ended in a glass doorknob.
They would push it down the driveway, one on each side, and when it got rolling good, Will would jump in, turn on the switch, retard the spark, step down on the clutch, punch the shift into first gear with his big hand clamped over the doorknob. Then he would holler: “Put me over the hump!” He’d pop the clutch and the old Ford engine would cough, choke, chug, backfire .
. . and sometimes actually start to run, rough at first, then smoothing out. Will would roar down the road toward Rhulin Farms, turn around in their driveway (if he had gone the other way, Henry Bowers’s crazy father Butch probably would have blown his head off with a shotgun), and then roar back, the unmuffled engine blatting stridently while Mike jumped up and down with excitement, cheering, and his mom stood in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on a dishtowel and pretending a disgust she didn’t really feel.
Other times the truck wouldn’t roll-start and Mike would have to wait until his father came back from the barn, carrying the crank and muttering under his breath. Mike was quite sure that some of the words so muttered were swears, and he would be a little frightened of his daddy then. (It wasn’t until much later, during one of those interminable visits to the hospital room where Will Hanlon lay dying, that he found out his father
muttered because he was afraid of the crank: once it had kicked back viciously, flown out of its socket, and torn the side of his mouth open. )
“Stand back, Mikey, ” he would say, slipping the crank into its socket at the base of the radiator. And when the A was finally running, he’d say that
next year he was going to trade it for a Chevrolet, but he never did. That old A-Ford hybrid was still in back of the home place, up to its axles and
henhouse tailgate in weeds.
When it was running, and Mike was sitting in the passenger seat, smelling hot oil and blue exhaust, excited by the keen breeze that washed in through the glassless hole where the windshield had once been, he would think: Spring’s here again. We’re all waking up. And in his soul he would
raise a silent cheer that shook the walls of that mostly cheerful room. He felt love for everything around him, and most of all for his dad, who would grin over at him and holler: “Hold on, Mikey! We gone wind this baby up! We gone make some birds run for cover!”
Then he would tear up the driveway, the A’s rear wheels spitting back black dirt and gray clods of clay, both of them jouncing up and down on the sofa-seat inside the open cab, laughing like stark natural-born fools. Will would run the A through the high grass of the back field, which was kept for hay, toward either the south field (potatoes), the west field (corn and beans), or the east field (peas, squash, and pumpkins). As they went, birds would burst up out of the grass before the truck, squawking in terror. Once a partridge flew up, a magnificent bird as brown as late-autumn oaks, the
explosive coughing whirr of its wings audible even over the pounding engine.
Those rides were Mike Hanlon’s door into spring.
The year’s work began with the rock harvest. Every day for a week they would take the A out and load the bed with rocks which might break a
harrow-blade when the time came to turn the earth and plant. Sometimes
the truck would get stuck in the mucky spring earth and Will would mutter darkly under his breath . . . more swears, Mike surmised. He knew some of the words and expressions; others, such as “son of a whore, ” puzzled him.
He had come across the word in the Bible, and so far as he could tell, a
whore was a woman who came from a place called Babylon. He had once set out to ask his father, but the A had been in mud up to her coil-springs, there had been thunderclouds on his father’s brow, and he had decided to
wait for a better time. He ended up asking Richie Tozier later that year and Richie told him his father had told him a whore was a woman who got paid for having s*x with men. “What’s having s*x? ” Mike had asked, and
Richie had wandered away holding his head.
On one occasion Mike had asked his father why, since they harvested rocks every April, there were always more of them the following April.
They had been standing at the dumping-off place near sunset on the last day of that year’s rock harvest. A beaten dirt track, not quite serious enough to be called a road, led from the bottom of the west field to this gully near
the bank of the Kenduskeag. The gully was a jumbled wasteland of rocks that had been dragged off Will’s land through the years.
Looking down at this badlands, which he had made first alone and then with the help of his son (somewhere under the rocks, he knew, were the rotting remains of the stumps he had yanked out one at a time before any of the fields could be tilled), Will had lighted a cigarette and said, “My daddy used to tell me that God loved rocks, houseflies, weeds, and poor people
above all the rest of His creations, and that’s why He made so many of them. ”
“But every year it’s like they come back. ”
“Yeah, I think they do, ” Will said. “That’s the only way I know to explain it. ”
A loon cried from the far side of the Kenduskeag in a dusky sunset that had turned the water a deep orange-red. It was a lonely sound, so lonely that it made Mike’s tired arms tighten with gooseflesh.
“I love you, Daddy, ” he said suddenly, feeling his love so strongly that tears stung his eyes.
“Why, I love you too, Mikey, ” his father said, and hugged him tight in his strong arms. Mike felt the rough fabric of his father’s flannel shirt against his cheek. “Now what do you say we go on back? We got just time to get a bath each before the good woman puts supper on the table. ”
“Ayuh, ” Mike said.
“Ayuh yourself, ” Will Hanlon said, and they both laughed, feeling tired but feeling good, arms and legs worked but not overworked, their hands rock-roughened but not hurting too bad.
Spring’s here, Mike thought that night, drowsing off in his room while his mother and father watched The Honeymooners in the other room.
Spring’s here again, thank You God, thank You very much. And turning to sleep, sinking down, he had heard the loon call again, the distance of its
marshes blending into the desire of his dreams. Spring was a busy time, but it was a good time.
Following the rock harvest, Will would park the A in the high grass back of the house and drive the tractor out of the barn. There would be harrowing then, his father driving the tractor, Mike either riding behind and holding on to the iron seat or walking alongside, picking up any rocks they had missed and throwing them aside. Then came planting, and following the planting
came summer’s work: hoeing . . . hoeing . . . hoeing. His mother would refurbish Larry, Moe, and Curly, their three scarecrows, and Mike would help his father put mooseblowers on top of each straw-filled head. A mooseblower was a can with both ends cut off. You tied a length of heavily waxed and rosined string tightly across the middle of the can and when the wind blew through it a wonderfully spooky sound resulted—a kind of whining croak. Crop-eating birds decided soon enough that Larry, Moe, and Curly were no threats, but the mooseblowers always frightened them off.
Starting in July, there was picking as well as hoeing—peas and radishes first, then the lettuce and the tomatoes that had been started in the shed- boxes, then the corn and beans in August, more corn and beans in September, then the pumpkins and the squash. Somewhere in the midst of all that came the new potatoes, and then, as the days shortened and the air sharpened, he and his dad would take in the mooseblowers (and sometime during the winter they would disappear; it seemed they had to make new
ones each spring). The day after, Will would call Norman Sadler (who was as dumb as his son Moose but infinitely more goodhearted), and Normie would come over with his potato-digger.
For the next three weeks all of them would work picking potatoes. In addition to the family, Will would hire three or four high-school boys to help pick, paying them a quarter a barrel. The A-Ford would cruise slowly up and down the rows of the south field, the biggest field, always in low gear, the tailgate down, the back filled with barrels, each marked with the name of the person picking into it, and at the end of the day Will would open his old creased wallet and pay each of the pickers cash money. Mike was paid, and so was his mother; that money was theirs, and Will Hanlon
never once asked either of them what they did with it. Mike had been given
a five-percent interest in the farm when he was five years old—old enough,
Will had told him then, to hold a hoe and to tell the difference between witchgrass and pea-plants. Each year he had been given another one
percent, and each year, on the day after Thanksgiving, Will would compute the farm’s profits and deduct Mike’s share . . . but Mike never saw any of that money. It went into his college account and was to be touched under absolutely no other circumstances.
At last the day would come when Normie Sadler drove his potato-digger back home; by then the air would have most likely turned gray and cold and there would be frost on the drift of orange pumpkins piled against the side of the barn. Mike would stand in the dooryard, his nose red, his dirty hands stuffed into his jeans pockets, and watch as his father drove first the tractor and then the A-Ford back into the barn. He would think: We’re getting
ready to go to sleep again. Spring . . . vanished. Summer . . . gone. Harvest- time . . . done. All that was left now was the butt end of autumn: leafless trees, frozen ground, a lacing of ice along the banks of the Kenduskeag. In
the fields, crows would sometimes land on the shoulders of Moe, Larry, and Curly, and stay as long as they liked. The scarecrows were voiceless, threatless.
Mike would not exactly be dismayed by the thought of another year ending—at nine and ten he was still too young to make mortal metaphors— because there was plenty to look forward to: sledding in McCarron Park (or on Rhulin Hill out here in Derrytown if you were brave, although that was mostly for big kids), ice-skating, snowball fights, snowfort building. There was time to think about snowshoeing out for a Christmas tree with his daddy, and time to think about the Nordica downhill skis he might or might not get for Christmas. Winter was good . . . but watching his father drive the A back into the barn
(spring vanished summer gone harvest-time done)
always made him feel sad, the way the squadrons of birds heading south for the winter made him feel sad, or the way a certain slant of light could
sometimes make him feel like crying for no good reason. We’re getting ready to go to sleep again. . . .
It was not all school and chores, chores and school; Will Hanlon had told his wife more than once that a boy needed time to go fishing, even if it wasn’t fishing he was really doing. When Mike came home from school he
first put his books on the TV in the parlor, second made himself some kind of snack (he was particularly partial to peanut-butter-and-onion sandwiches, a taste that made his mother raise her hands in helpless horror), and third studied the note his father had left him, telling Mike where he, Will, was and what Mike’s chores were—certain rows to be weeded or picked,
baskets to be carried, produce to be rotated, the barn to be swept, whatever. But on at least one schoolday a week—and sometimes two—there would be no note. And on these days Mike would go fishing, even if it wasn’t really fishing he was doing. Those were great days . . . days when he had no particular place to go and consequently felt no urge to get there in a hurry.
Once in awhile his father left him another sort of note: “No chores, ” one might say. “Go over to Old Cape & look at trolley tracks. ” Mike would go over to the Old Cape area, find the streets with the tracks still embedded in them, and inspect them closely, marvelling to think of things like trains that had run right through the middle of the streets. That night he and his father might talk about them, and his dad would show him pictures from his Derry album of the trolleys actually running: a funny pole went from the roof of
the trolley up to an electrical wire, and there were cigarette ads on the side. Another time he had sent Mike to Memorial Park, where the Standpipe was, to look at the birdbath, and once they had gone to the courthouse together to look at a terrible machine that Chief Borton had found in the attic. This gadget was called a tramp-chair. It was cast-iron, and there were manacles built into the arms and legs. Rounded knobs stuck out of the back and seat. It reminded Mike of a photograph he had seen in some book—a photograph of the electric chair at Sing Sing. Chief Borton let Mike sit in the tramp- chair and try on the manacles.
After the first ominous novelty of wearing the manacles wore off, Mike looked questioningly at his father and Chief Borton, not sure why this was supposed to be such a horrible punishment for the “vags” (Borton’s word for them) that had drifted into town in the twenties and thirties. The knobs made the chair a little uncomfortable to sit in, sure, and the manacles on your wrists and ankles made it hard to shift to a more comfortable position, but—
“Well, you’re just a kid, ” Chief Borton said, laughing. “What do you
weigh? Seventy, eighty pounds? Most of the vags Sheriff Sully posted into that chair in the old days would go twice that. They’d feel a bit
oncomfortable after an hour or so, really oncomfortable after two or three, and right bad after four or five. After seven or eight hours they’d staat bellerin, and after sixteen or seventeen they’d staat cryin, mostly. And by the time their twenty-four-hour tour was up, they’d be willin to swear
before God and man that the next time they came riding the rods up New England way they’d give Derry a wide berth. So far as I know, most of em did. Twenty-four hours in the tramp-chair was a helluva persuader. ”
Suddenly there seemed to be more knobs in the chair, digging more deeply into his buttocks, spine, the small of his back, even the nape of his neck. “Can I get out now, please? ” he said politely, and Chief Borton laughed again. There was a moment, one panicked instant of time, when Mike thought the Chief would only dangle the key to the manacles in front of Mike’s eyes and say, Sure I’ll let you out . . . when your twenty-four
hours is up.
“Why did you take me there, Daddy? ” he asked on the way home. “You’ll know when you’re older, ” Will had replied.
“You don’t like Chief Borton, do you? ”
“No, ” his father had replied in a voice so curt that Mike hadn’t dared ask any more.
But Mike enjoyed most of the places in Derry his father sent or took him to, and by the time Mike was ten Will had succeeded in conveying his own interest in the layers of Derry’s history to his son. Sometimes, as when he had been trailing his fingers over the slightly pebbled surface of the stand in which the Memorial Park birdbath was set, or when he had squatted down to look more closely at the trolley tracks which grooved Mont Street in the Old Cape, he would be struck by a profound sense of time . . . time as something real, as something that had unseen weight, the way sunlight was supposed to have weight (some of the kids in school had laughed when Mrs. Greenguss told them that, but Mike had been too stunned by the concept to laugh; his first thought had been, Light has weight? Oh my Lord, that’s terrible!) . . . time as something that would eventually bury him.
The first note his father left him in that spring of 1958 was scribbled on the back of an envelope and held down with a saltshaker. The air was spring-warm, wonderfully sweet, and his mother had opened all the windows. No chores, the note read. If you want to, ride your bike out to
Pasture Road. You’ll see a lot of tumbled masonry and old machinery out in
the field on your left. Have a look around, bring back a souvenir. Don’t go near the cellarhole! And be back before dark. You know why.
Mike knew why, all right.
He told his mother where he was going and she frowned. “Why don’t you see if Randy Robinson wants to go with you? ”
“Yeah, okay, I’ll stop by and ask him, ” Mike said.
He did, too, but Randy had gone up to Bangor with his father to buy seedling potatoes. So Mike rode his bike over to Pasture Road alone. It was a goodish ride—a little over four miles. Mike reckoned it was three o’clock by the time he leaned his bike against an old wooden slat-fence on the left side of Pasture Road and climbed into the field beyond. He would have
maybe an hour to explore and then he would have to start home again. Ordinarily, his mother would not be upset with him as long as he was back by six, when she put dinner on the table, but one memorable episode had taught him that wasn’t the case this year. On that one occasion when he had been late for dinner, she had been nearly hysterical. She took after him with a dishrag, whopping him with it as he stood open-mouthed in the kitchen entryway, his wicker creel with the rainbow trout in it at his feet.
“Don’t you ever scare me like that!” she had screamed. “Don’t you ever!
Don’t you ever! Ever-ever-ever!”
Each ever had been punctuated by another dishrag swat. Mike had expected his father to step in and put a stop to it, but his father hadn’t done so. Perhaps he knew that if he did she would turn her wildcat anger on
him as well. Mike had learned the lesson; one whopping with the dishrag was all it took. Home before dark. Yes ma’am, right-o.
He walked across the field toward the titanic ruins standing in the center. This was, of course, the remains of the Kitchener Ironworks—he had ridden past it but had never thought to actually explore it, and he had never heard any kids saying that they had. Now, stooping to examine a few tumbled
bricks that had formed a rough cairn, he thought he could understand why. The field was dazzlingly bright, washed by sun from the spring sky (occasionally, as a cloud passed before the sun, a great shutter of shadow would travel slowly across the field), but there was something spooky about it all the same—a brooding silence that was broken only by the wind. He felt like an explorer who has found the last remnants of some fabulous lost city.
Up ahead and to the right, he saw the rounded side of a massive tile cylinder rising out of the high field grass. He ran over to it. It was the Ironworks’ main smokestack. He peered into its bore, and felt a fresh chill worm up his spine. It was big enough so he could have walked into it if he had wanted. But he didn’t want to; God knew what strange guck there might be, clinging to the smoke-blackened inner tiles, or what nasty bugs or beasts might have taken up residence inside. The wind gusted. When it
blew across the mouth of the fallen stack it made a sound eerily like the sound of the wind vibrating the waxed strings he and his dad put in the
mooseblowers every spring. He stepped back nervously, suddenly thinking about the movie he and his father had watched last night on the Early Show. It had been called Rodan, and watching it had seemed like great fun at the time, his father laughing and shouting “Git that bird, Mikey!” every time Rodan made its appearance, Mike shooting with his finger until his mom popped her head in and told them to hush up before they gave her a
headache with the noise.
It didn’t seem so funny now. In the movie Rodan had been released from the bowels of the earth by these Japanese coal-miners who had been digging the world’s deepest tunnel. And looking into the black bore of this pipe, it was all too easy to imagine that bird crouched at the far end, leathery batlike wings folded over its back, staring at the small, round
boyface looking into the darkness, staring, staring with its gold-ringed eyes.
. . .
Shivering, Mike pulled back.
He walked aways down the smokestack, which had sunken into the earth to half of its circumference. The land rose slightly, and on impulse he scrambled his way up on top. The stack was a lot less scary on the outside, its tiled surface sunwarm. He got to his feet and strolled along, holding his arms out (the surface was really too wide for him to need to worry about falling off, but he was pretending he was a tightwire-walker in the circus), liking the way the wind blew through his hair.
At the far end he jumped down and began to examine stuff: more bricks, twisted molds, hunks of wood, pieces of rusty machinery. Bring back a
souvenir, his father’s note had said: he wanted a good one.
He wandered closer to the mill’s yawning cellarhold, looking at the debris, being careful not to cut himself on the broken glass. There was a lot
of it around.
Mike was not unmindful of the cellarhold and his father’s warning to stay out of it; neither was he unmindful of the death that had been dealt out on
this spot fifty-odd years before. He supposed that if there was a haunted
place in Derry, this was it. But either in spite of that or because of it, he was determined to stay until he found something really good to take back and
show his father.
He moved slowly and soberly toward the cellarhold, changing his course to parallel its ragged side, when a warning voice inside whispered that he was getting too close, that a bank weakened by the spring rains could
crumble under his heels and pitch him into that hole, where God only knew how much sharp iron might be waiting to impale him like a bug, leaving him to die a rusty twitching death.
He picked up a window-sash and tossed it aside. Here was a dipper big enough for a giant’s table, its handle rippled and warped by some
unimaginable flash of heat. Here was a piston too big for him to even budge, let alone lift. He stepped over it. He stepped over it and—
What if I find a skull? he thought suddenly. The skull of one of the kids who were killed here while they were hunting for chocolate Easter eggs back in nineteen-whenever-it-was?
He looked around the sunwashed empty field, nastily shocked by the idea. The wind blew a low conch-note in his ears and another shadow cruised silently across the field, like the shadow of a giant bat . . . or bird. He became aware all over again of how quiet it was here, and how strange the field looked with its straggling piles of masonry and its beached iron
hulks leaning this way and that. It was as if some horrid battle had been fought here long ago.
Don’t be such a dip, he replied uneasily to himself. They found everything there was to find fifty years ago. After it happened. And even if
they didn’t, some other kid—or grownup—would have found . . . the rest . . . since then. Or do you think you’re the only person who ever came here hunting for souvenirs?
No . . . no, I don’t think that. But . . .
But what? that rational side of his mind demanded, and Mike thought it was talking just a little too loud, a little too fast. Even if there was still something to find, it would have decayed long ago. So . . . what?
Mike found a splintered desk drawer in the weeds. He glanced at it, tossed it aside, and moved a little closer to the cellarhold, where the stuff was thickest. Surely he would find something there.
But what if there are ghosts? That’s but what. What if I see hands coming over the edge of that cellarhold, and what if they start to come up, kids in
the remains of their Easter Sunday clothes, clothes that are all rotted and torn and marked with fifty years of spring mud and fall rain and caked
winter snow? Kids with no heads (he had heard at school that, after the explosion, a woman had found the head of one of the victims in a tree in her back yard), kids with no legs, kids flayed open like codfish, kids just like me who would maybe come down and play . . . down there where it’s dark . . .
under the leaning iron girders and the big old rusty cogs. . . .
Oh, stop it, for the Lord’s sake!
But a shudder wrenched its way up his back and he decided it was time to take something—anything—and get the dickens out of here. He reached down, almost at random, and came up with a gear-toothed wheel about seven inches in diameter. He had a pencil in his pocket and he used it, quickly, to dig the dirt out of the teeth. Then he slipped his souvenir in his pocket. He would go now. He would go, yes—
But his feet moved slowly in the wrong direction, toward the cellarhold, and he realized with a dismal sort of horror that he needed to look down inside. He had to see.
He gripped a spongy support-beam leaning out of the earth and swayed forward, trying to see down and inside. He couldn’t quite do it. He had
come to within fifteen feet of the edge, but that was still a little too far to see the bottom of the cellarhold.
I don’t care if I see the bottom or not. I’m going back now. I’ve got my
souvenir. I don’t need to look down into any crummy old hole. And Daddy’s note said to stay away from it.
But the unhappy, almost feverish curiosity that had gripped him would not let go. He approached the cellarhold step by queasy step, aware that as soon as the wooden beam was out of his reach there would be no more grab-holds, also aware that the ground here was indeed squelchy and crumbly. In places along the edge he could see depressions, like graves that had fallen in, and knew that they were the sites of previous cave-ins.
Heart thudding in his chest like the hard measured strides of a soldier’s boots, he reached the edge and looked down.
Nested in the cellarhold, the bird looked up.
Mike was not at first sure what he was seeing. All the nerves and
pathways in his body seemed frozen, including those which conducted thoughts. It was not just the shock of seeing a monster bird, a bird whose breast was as orange as a robin’s and whose feathers were the unremarkable fluffy gray of a sparrow’s feathers; most of it was the shock of the utterly unexpected. He had expected monoliths of machinery half-submerged in stagnant puddles and black mud; instead he was looking down into a giant nest which filled the cellarhold from end to end and side to side. It had been made out of enough timothy grass to make a dozen bales of hay, but this
grass was silvery and old. The bird sat in the middle of it, its brightly ringed eyes as black as fresh, warm tar, and for an insane moment before his
paralysis broke, Mike could see himself reflected in each of them.
Then the ground suddenly began to shift and run out from beneath his feet. He heard the tearing sound of shallow roots giving way and realized he was sliding.
With a yell he threw himself backward, pinwheeling his arms for balance. He lost it and thumped heavily to the littered ground. Some hard, dull chunk of metal pressed painfully into his back, and he had time to think of the tramp-chair before he heard the whirring, explosive sound of the bird’s wings.
He scrambled to his knees, crawled, looked back over his shoulder, and saw it rising out of the cellarhold. Its scaly talons were a dusky orange. Its beating wings, each more than ten feet across, blew the scraggy timothy
grass this way and that, patternlessly, like the wind generated by helicopter rotors. It uttered a buzzing, chirruping scream. A few loose feathers slipped from its wings and spiraled back down into the cellarhold.
Mike gained his feet again and began to run.
He pounded across the field, not looking back now, afraid to look back. The bird did not look like Rodan, but he sensed it was the spirit of Rodan, risen from the cellarhold of the Kitchener Ironworks like a horrible bird-in- the-box. He stumbled, went to one knee, got up, and ran on.
That weird chirruping buzzing screech came again. A shadow covered him and when he looked up he saw the thing: it had passed less than five
feet over his head. Its beak, dirty yellow, opened and closed, revealing a pink lining inside. It whirled back toward Mike. The wind it generated washed across his face, bringing a dry unpleasant smell with it: attic dust, dead antiques, rotting cushions.
He jigged to his left, and now he saw the fallen smokestack again. He sprinted for it, running all-out, his arms pumping in short jabbing strokes at his sides. The bird screamed, and he heard its fluttering wings. They sounded like sails. Something slammed into the back of his head. Warm fire traced its way up the nape of his neck. He felt it spread as blood began to
trickle down the back of his shirt-collar.
The bird whirled around again, meaning to pick him up with its talons and carry him away like a hawk with a fieldmouse. Meaning to carry him back to its nest. Meaning to eat him.
As it flew at him, swooping down, its black, horribly alive eyes fixed on him, Mike cut sharply right. The bird missed him—barely. The dusty smell of its wings was overpowering, unbearable.
Now he was running parallel to the fallen smokestack, its tiles blurring by. He could see where it ended. If he could reach the end and buttonhook to the left, get inside, he might be safe. He thought the bird was too big to squeeze inside. He came very close to not making it. The bird flew at him again, pulling up as it closed in, its wings flapping and pushing air in a hurricane, its scaly talons now angled toward him and descending. It screamed again, and this time Mike thought he heard triumph in its voice.
He lowered his head, put his arm up, and rammed straight forward. The talons closed and for a moment the bird had him by the forearm. The grip was like the clutch of incredibly strong fingers tipped with tough nails.
They bit like teeth. The bird’s flapping wings were a thunder in his ears; he was dimly aware of feathers falling around him, some brushing past his
cheeks like phantom kisses. The bird rose then, and for just a moment Mike felt himself pulled upward, first straight, then on tiptoe . . . and for one freezing second he felt the toes of his Keds lose contact with the earth.
“Let me GO!” he screamed at it, and twisted his arm. For a moment the talons held on, and then the sleeve of his shirt ripped. He thumped back down. The bird squalled. Mike ran again, brushing through the thing’s
tailfeathers, gagging at that dry smell. It was like running through a shower- curtain of feathers.
Still coughing, eyes stinging from both tears and whatever vile dust coated the bird’s feathers, he stumbled into the fallen smokestack. There was no thought now of what might be lurking inside. He ran into the darkness, his gasping sobs taking on a flat echo. He went back perhaps twenty feet and then turned toward the bright circle of daylight. His chest
was rising and falling in quick jerks. He was suddenly aware that, if he had misjudged either the size of the bird or the size of the smokestack’s muzzle, he had killed himself as surely as if he had put his father’s shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. There was no way out. This wasn’t just a pipe; it was a blind alley. The other end of the stack was buried in the earth.
The bird squalled again, and suddenly the light at the end of the smokestack was blotted out as it lighted on the ground outside. He could see its yellow scaly legs, each as thick as a man’s calf. Then it cocked its head down and looked inside. Mike found himself again staring into those hideously bright fresh-tar eyes with their gold wedding-rings of iris. The
bird’s beak opened and closed, opened and closed, and each time it snapped shut he heard an audible click, like the sound you hear in your own ears when you snap your teeth together hard. Sharp, he thought. Its beak is sharp. I guess I knew birds had sharp beaks, but I never really thought about it until now.
It squawked again. The sound was so loud in the tile throat of the stack that Mike clapped his hands to his ears.
The bird began to force itself into the mouth of the stack. “No!” Mike cried. “No, you can’t!”
The light faded as more of the bird’s body pressed its way into the stack’s bore (Oh my Lord, why didn’t I remember it was mostly feathers? Why didn’t I remember it could squeeze? ). The light faded . . . faded . . . was gone. Now there was only an inky blackness, the suffocating attic-smell of
the bird, and the rustling sound of its feathers.
Mike fell on his knees and began to grope on the curved floor of the smokestack, his hands spread wide, feeling. He found a piece of broken tile, its sharp edges furred with what felt like moss. He cocked his arm back and pegged it. There was a thump. The bird uttered its buzzing, chirruping sound again.
“Get out of here!” Mike screamed.
There was silence . . . and then that crackly, rustling sound began again as the bird resumed forcing itself into the pipe. Mike felt along the floor, found other pieces of tile, and began to throw one after another. They thumped and thudded off the bird and then clinked to the tile sleeve of the smokestack.
Please, God, Mike thought incoherently. Please God, please God, please God—
It came to him that he ought to retreat down the smokestack’s bore. He had run in through what had been the stack’s base; it stood to reason that it would narrow as he backed up. He could retreat, yes, and listen to that low dusty rustle as the bird worked its way in after him. He could retreat, and if he was lucky he might get beyond the point where the bird could continue to advance.
But what if the bird got stuck?
If that happened, he and the bird would die in here together. They would die in here together and rot in here together. In the dark.
“Please, God!” he screamed, and was totally unaware that he had cried out aloud. He threw another piece of tile, and this time his throw was more powerful—he felt, he told the others much later, as if someone were behind him at that moment, and that someone had given his arm a tremendous push. This time there was no feathery thud; instead there was a splatting sound, the sound a kid’s hand might make slapping into the surface of a bowl of half-solidified Jell-O. This time the bird screamed not in anger but in real pain. The tenebrous whirr of its wings filled the smokestack; stinking air streamed past Mike in a hurricane, flapping his clothes, making him cough and gag and retreat as dust and moss flew.
Light appeared again, gray and weak at first, then brightening and shifting as the bird retreated from the stack’s muzzle. Mike burst into tears, fell to his knees again, and began grubbing madly for more pieces of tile.
Without any conscious thought, he ran forward with both hands full of tiling (in this light he could see the pieces were splotched with blue-gray moss and lichen, like the surface of slate gravestones), until he was nearly
at the mouth of the stack. He intended to keep the bird from coming back in if he could.
It bent down, cocking its head the way a trained bird on a perch will sometimes cock its head, and Mike saw where his last shot had struck
home. The bird’s right eye was nearly gone. Instead of that glittering bubble of fresh tar, there was a crater filled with blood. Whitish-gray goo dripped from the corner of the socket and trickled along the side of the bird’s beak. Tiny parasites wriggled and squirmed in this pussy discharge.
It saw him and lunged forward. Mike began to throw chunks of tile at it. They struck its head and beak. It withdrew for a moment and then lunged again, beak opening, revealing that pink lining again, revealing something else that caused Mike to freeze for a moment, his own mouth dropping open. The bird’s tongue was silver, its surface as crazy-cracked as the
surface of a volcanic land which has first baked and then slagged off.
And on this tongue, like weird tumbleweeds that had taken temporary root there, were a number of orange puffs.
Mike threw the last of his tiles directly into that gaping maw and the bird withdrew again, screaming its frustration, rage, and pain. For a moment
Mike could see its reptilian talons. Then its wings ruffled the air and it
was gone.
A moment later he lifted his face—a face that was gray-brown under the dirt, dust, and bits of moss that the bird’s wind-machine wings had blown at him—toward the clicking sound of its talons on the tile. The only clean
places on Mike’s face were the tracks that had been washed clean by his tears.
The bird walked back and forth overhead: Tak-tak-tak-tak.
Mike retreated a bit, gathered up more chunks of tile, and heaped them as close to the mouth of the stack as he dared. If the thing came back, he wanted to be able to fire at it from point-blank range. The light outside was still bright— now that it was May, it wouldn’t get dark for a long time yet— but suppose the bird just decided to wait?
Mike swallowed, the dry sides of his throat rubbing together for a moment.
Overhead: Tak-tak-tak.
He had a fine pile of ammunition now. In the dim light, here beyond the place where the angle of the sun made a shadow-spiral inside the pipe, it looked like a pile of broken crockery swept together by a housewife. Mike rubbed the palms of his dirty hands along the sides of his jeans and waited to see what would happen next.
A space of time passed before something did—whether five minutes or twenty-five, he could not tell. He was only aware of the bird walking back and forth overhead like an insomniac pacing the floor at three in the morning.
Then its wings fluttered again. It landed in front of the smokestack’s opening. Mike, on his knees just behind his pile of tiling, began to peg missiles at it before it could even bend its head down. One of them slammed into a plated yellow leg and drew a trickle of blood so dark it
seemed almost as black as the bird’s eyes. Mike screamed in triumph, the sound thin and almost lost under the bird’s own enraged squawk.
“Get out of here!” Mike cried. “I’m going to keep hitting you until you get out of here, I swear to God I will!”
The bird flew up to the top of the smokestack and resumed its pacing. Mike waited.
Finally its wings ruffled again as it took off. Mike waited, expecting the yellow feet, so like hen’s feet, to appear again. They didn’t. He waited longer, convinced it had to be some kind of a trick, realizing at last that that wasn’t why he was waiting at all. He was waiting because he was scared to go out, scared to leave the safety of this bolthole.
Never mind! Never mind stuff like that! I’m not a rabbit!
He took as many chunks of tile as he could handle comfortably, then put some more inside his shirt. He stepped out of the smokestack, trying to look everywhere at once and wishing madly for eyes in the back of his head. He saw only the field stretching ahead and around him, littered with the exploded rusting remains of the Kitchener Ironworks. He wheeled around,
sure he would see the bird perched on the lip of the stack like a vulture, a one-eyed vulture now, only wanting the boy to see him before it attacked for the final time, using that sharp beak to jab and rip and strip.
But the bird was not there. It was really gone.
Mike’s nerve snapped.
He uttered a breaking scream of fear and ran for the weather-beaten fence between the field and the road, dropping the last pieces of tile from his hands. Most of the others fell out of his shirt as the shirt pulled free of his belt. He vaulted over the fence one-handed, like Roy Rogers showing off for Dale Evans on his way back from the corral with Pat Brady and the rest
of the buckaroos. He grabbed the handlebars of his bike and ran beside it forty feet up the road before getting on. Then he pedaled madly, not daring to look back, not daring to slow down, until he reached the intersection of Pasture Road and Outer Main Street, where there were lots of cars passing back and forth.
When he got home, his father was changing the plugs on the tractor. Will observed that Mike looked powerful musty and dusty. Mike hesitated for just a split second and then told his father that he’d taken a tumble from his bike on the way home, swerving to avoid a pothole.
“Did you break anything, Mikey? ” Will asked, observing his son a little more carefully.
“No, sir. ” “Sprains? ” “Huh-uh. ”
“Sure? ”
Mike nodded.
“Did you pick yourself up a souvenir? ”
Mike reached into his pocket and found the gear-wheel. He showed it to his father, who looked at it briefly and then plucked a tiny crumb of tiling from the pad of flesh just below Mike’s thumb. He seemed more interested in this.
“From that old smokestack? ” Will asked. Mike nodded.
“You go inside there? ” Mike nodded again.
“See anything in there? ” Will asked, and then, as if to make a joke of the question (which hadn’t sounded like a joke at all), he added: “Buried
treasure? ”
Smiling a little, Mike shook his head.
“Well, don’t tell your mother you was muckin about in there, ” Will said. “She’d shoot me first and you second. ” He looked even more closely at his son. “Mikey, are you all right? ”
“Huh? ”
“You look a little peaky around the eyes. ”
“I guess I might be a little tired, ” Mike said. “It’s eight or ten miles there and back again, don’t forget. You want some help with the tractor, Daddy? ”
“No, I’m about done screwing it up for this week. You go on in and wash up. ”
Mike started away, and then his father called to him once more. Mike looked back.
“I don’t want you going around that place again, ” he said, “at least not until all this trouble is cleared up and they catch the man who’s doing it . . . you didn’t see anybody out there, did you? No one chased you, or hollered you down? ”
“I didn’t see any people at all, ” Mike said.
Will nodded and lit a cigarette. “I think I was wrong to send you there.
Old places like that . . . sometimes they can be dangerous. ” Their eyes locked briefly.
“Okay, Daddy, ” Mike said. “I don’t want to go back anyway. It was a little spooky. ”
Will nodded again. “Less said the better, I reckon. You go and get cleaned up now. And tell her to put on three or four extra sausages. ”
Mike did.
6
Never mind that now, Mike Hanlon thought, looking at the grooves which went up to the concrete edge of the Canal and stopped there. Never mind that, it might just have been a dream anyhow, and—
There were splotches of dried blood on the lip of the Canal.
Mike looked at these, and then he looked down into the Canal. Black water flowed smoothly past. Runners of dirty yellow foam clung to the Canal’s sides, sometimes breaking free to flow downstream in lazy loops and curves. For a moment—just a moment—two clots of this foam came together and seemed to form a face, a kid’s face, its eyes turned up in an avatar of terror and agony.
Mike’s breath caught, as if on a thorn.
The foam broke apart, became meaningless again, and at that moment there was a loud splash on his right. Mike snapped his head around,
shrinking back a little, and for a moment he believed he saw something in
the shadows of the outflow tunnel where the Canal resurfaced after its course under downtown.
Then it was gone.
Suddenly, cold and shuddering, he dug in his pocket for the knife he had found in the grass. He threw it into the Canal. There was a small splash, a ripple that began as a circle and was then tugged into the shape of an arrowhead by the current . . . then nothing.
Nothing except the fear that was suddenly suffocating him and the deadly certainty that there was something near, something watching him, gauging
its chances, biding its time.
He turned, meaning to walk back to his bike—to run would be to dignify those fears and undignify himself—and then that splashing sound came again. It was a lot louder this second time. So much for dignity. Suddenly
he was running as fast as he could, beating his buns for the gate and his bike, jamming the kickstand up with one heel and pedaling for the street as fast as he could. That sea-smell was all at once too thick . . . much too thick.
It was everywhere. And the water dripping from the wet branches of the trees seemed much too loud.
Something was coming. He heard dragging, lurching footsteps in the grass.
He stood on the pedals, giving it everything, and shot out onto Main Street without looking back. He headed for home as fast as he could, wondering what in hell had possessed him to come in the first place . . . what had drawn him.
And then he tried to think about the chores, the whole chores, and nothing but the chores. After awhile he actually succeeded.
And when he saw the headline in the paper the next day (MISSING BOY PROMPTS NEW FEARS), he thought about the pocket knife he had thrown into the Canal—the pocket knife with the initials E. C. scratched on the side. He thought about the blood he had seen on the grass.
And he thought about those grooves which stopped at the edge of the Canal.
