A muttered exclamation in another room - his father. Tad Trenton clapped his hands to his eyes, hitched in breath, and screamed. He heard its purring growl he smelled its sweet carrion breath. And its eyes rolled to follow him as he sat up, his scrotum crawling, his hair standing on end, his breath a thin winter-whistle in his throat: mad eyes that laughed, eyes that promised horrible death and the music of screams that went unheard something in the closet. Low to the ground it was, with huge shoulders bulking above its cocked head, its eyes amber-glowing, pits - a thing that might have been half man, half wolf. He pulled the covers up, and that was when he saw the creature in his closet. He urinated forever, flushed, and went back to bed. He got out of bed and walked half asleep toward the white light thrown in a wedge through the half-open door, already lowering his pajama pants. Tad Trenton, four years old, awoke one morning not long after midnight in May of that year, needing to go to the bathroom. It came to Castle Rock again in the summer of 1980. Werewolf, vampire, ghoul, unnameable creature from the wastes. The monster was gone, the monster was dead. There were nightmares to be sure, and children who lay wakeful to be sure, and the empty Dodd house (for his mother had a stroke shortly afterwards and died) quickly gained a reputation as a haunted house and was avoided but these were passing phenomena - the perhaps unavoidable side effects of a chain of senseless murders. shhhh But for most, the ending was the ending. He's out there, and if you're not good, it may be his face you see looking in your bedroom window after everyone in the house is asleep except you it may be his smiling face you see peeking at you from the closet in the middle of the night, the STOP sign he held up when he crossed the little children in one band, the razor he used to kill himself in the other. He's out there, I can bear the grandmother whispering as the wind whistles down the chimney pipe and snuffles around the old pot lid crammed in the stove hole. And surely a hush fell as children looked toward their dark windows and thought of Frank Dodd in his shiny black vinyl raincoat, Frank Dodd who had choked. ![]() Yet even in this enlightened age, when so many parents are aware of the psychological damage they may do to their children, surely there was one parent somewhere in Castle Rock - or perhaps one grandmother - who quieted the kids by telling them that Frank Dodd would get them if they didn't watch out, if they weren't good. A town's nightmares were buried in Frank Dodd's grave. ![]() There was some shock, of course, but mostly there was rejoicing in that small town, rejoicing because the monster which had haunted so many dreams was dead, dead at last. A good man named John Smith uncovered his name by a kind of magic, but before he could be captured - perhaps it was just as well - Frank Dodd killed himself. ![]() He was not werewolf, vampire, ghoul, or unnameable creature from the enchanted forest or from the snowy wastes he was only a cop named Frank Dodd with mental and sexual problems. a waitress named Alma Frechette in 1970 a woman named Pauline Toothaker and a junior high school student named Cheryl Moody in 1971 a pretty girl named Carol Dunbarger in 1974 a teacher named Etta Ringgold in the fall of 1975 finally, a gradeschooler named Mary Kate Hendrasen in the early winter of that same year. THE SHARP CEREAL PROFESSOR ONCE UPON A TIME, not so long ago, a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock, Maine. Every link you know I did call his name, I called, "Here, Blue, you good dog, you. I dug his grave with a silver spade And I lowered him down with a golden chain. AUDEN, "Musee des Beaux Arts" Old Blue died and he died so hard He shook the ground in my back yard. About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or Mt walking dully along.
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