They weren’t all found. No; they weren’t all found. And from time to time wrong assumptions were made.
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 News reporter 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 stern 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 body 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.
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 some times 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 freeże) 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.