'The blankets. In Tad's closet. They were back in there. The chair was back in there, too, and the door was open again.' She brought the bacon, draining on a paper towel and still sizzling, to the table. 'Did you put them back on his chair?'
'Not me,' Vic said, turning a page. 'It smells like a mothball convention back there.'
'That's funny. He must have put them back.'
He put the paper aside and looked up at her. 'What are you talking about, Donna?'
'You remember the bad dream last night
'Not apt to forget. I thought the kid was dying. Having a convulsion or something.'
She nodded. 'He thought the blankets were some kind of -' She shrugged.
'Bogeyman,' Vic said, grinning.
'I guess so. And you gave him his teddybear and put those blankets in the back of the closet. But they were back on the chair when I went to make his bed.' She laughed. 'I looked in, and for just a second there I thought -'
'Now I know where he gets it,' W said, picking up the newspaper again. He cocked a friendly eye at her. 'Three hot dogs, my ass.' Later, after Vic had shot off to work, Donna asked Tad why he had put the chair back in the closet with the blankets on it if they had scared him in the night.
Tad looked up at her, and his normally animated, lively face seemed pale and watchful -too old. His Star Wars coloring book was open in front of him. He had been doing a picture from the interstellar cantina, using his green Crayola to color Greedo.
'I didn't,' he said.
'But Tad, if you didn't, and Daddy didn't, and I didn't
'The monster did it,' Tad said. 'The monster in my closet.'
He bent to his picture again.
She stood looking at him, troubled, a little frightened. He was a bright boy, and perhaps too imaginative. This was not such good news. She would have to talk to Vic about it tonight. She would have to have a long talk with him about it.
'Tad, remember what your father said,' she told him now. 'There aren't any such things as monsters.'
'Not in the daytime, anyway,' he said, and smiled at her so openly, so beautifully, that she was charmed out of her fears. She ruffled his hair and kissed his cheek.
She meant to talk to Vic, and then Steve Kemp came while Tad was at nursery school, and she forgot, and Tad screamed that night too, screamed that it was in his closet, the monster, the monster!
The closet door hung ajar, blankets on the chair. This time Vic took them up to the third floor and stacked them in the closet up there.
'Locked it up, Tadder,' Vic said, kissing his son. 'You're all set now. Go back to sleep and have a good dream.'
But Tad did not sleep for a long time, and before he did the closet door swung dear of its latch with a sly little snicking sound, the dead mouth opened on the dead dark -' the dead dark where something furry and sharp-toothed and -clawed waited, something that smelled of sour blood and dark doom.
Hello, Tad, it whispered in its rotting voice, and the moon peered in Tad's window like the white and slitted eye of a dead man.
The oldest living person in Castle Rock that late spring was Evelyn Chalmers, known as Aunt Evvie by the town's older residents, known as 'that old loudmouth bitch' by George Meara, who had to deliver her mail -' which mostly consisted of catalogues and offers from the Reader's Digest and prayer folders from the Crusade of the Eternal Christ -' and listen to her endless monologues. 'The only thing that old loudmouth bitch is any good at is telling the weather,' George had been known to allow when in his cups and in the company of his cronies down at the Mellow Tiger. It was one stupid name for a bar, but since it was the only one Castle Rock could boast, it looked like they were pretty much stuck with it.
There was general agreement with George's opinion. As the oldest resident of Castle Rock, Aunt Evvie had held the Boston Post cane for the last two years, ever since Arnold Heebert, who had been one hundred and one and so far gone in senility that talking to him held all the intellectual challenge of talking to an empty catfood can, had doddered off the back patio of the Castle Acres Nursing Home and broken his neck exactly twenty-five minutes after whizzing in his pants for the last time.
Aunt Evvie was nowhere near as senile as Arnie Heebert had been, and nowhere near as old, but at ninety-three she was old enough, and, as she was fond of bawling at a resigned (and often hungover) George Meara when he delivered the mail, she hadn't been stupid enough to lose her home the way Heebert had done. But she was good at the weather. The town consensus among the older people, who cared about such things - was that Aunt Evvie was never wrong about three things: the week when the 'first haycutting would happen in the summertime, how good (or how bad) the blueberries would be, and what the weather would be like.
One day early that June she shuffled out to the mailbox at the end of the driveway, leaning heavily on her Boston Post cane (which would go to Vin Marchant when the loudmouthed old bitch popped off, George Meara thought, and good riddance to you, Evvie) and smoking a Herbert Tareyton. She bellowed a greeting at Meara - her deafness had apparently convinced her that everyone else in the world had gone deaf in sympathy - and then shouted that they were going to have the hottest summer in thirty years. Hot early and hot late, Evvie bellowed leather-lunged into the drowsy eleven-o'clock quiet, and hot in the middle.
'That so?' George asked.
'What?'
'I said, "Is that so?"' That was the other thing about Aunt Evvie; she got you shouting right along with her. A man could pop a blood vessel.
'I should hope to smile and kiss a pig if it ain't!' Aunt Evvie screamed. The ash of her cigarette fell on the shoulder of George Meara's uniform blouse, freshly dry-cleaned and just put on clean this morning; he brushed it off resignedly. Aunt Evvie leaned in the window of his car, all the better to bellow in his ear. Her breath smelled like sour cucumbers.
'Fieldmice has all gone outta the root cellars! Tommy Neadeau seen deer out by Moosuntic Pond rubbin velvet off'n their antlers ere the first robin showed up! Grass under the snow when she melted! Green grass, Meara!'
'That so, Evvie?' George replied, since some reply seemed necessary. He was getting a headache.
'What?'
'THAT SO, AUNT EVVIE?' George Mear screamed. Saliva flew from his lips.
'Oh, ayuh!' Aunt Evvie howled back contentedly. 'And I seen beat lightnin last night late! Bad sign, Meara! Early beat's a bad sign! Be people. die of the heat this summer! It's gonna be a bad un!'
'I got to go, Aunt Evvie!' George yelled. 'Got a Special Delivery for Stringer Beaulieu!'
Aunt Evvie Chalmers threw her head back and cackled at the spring sky. She cackled until she was fit to choke and more cigarette ashes rolled down the front of her housedress. She spat the last quarter inch of cigarette out of her mouth, and it lay smoldering in the driveway by one of her old-lady shoes - a shoe as black as a stove and as tight as a corset; a shoe for the ages.