the chair when I went in to make his bed.” She laughed. “I looked in, and for just a second there I thought—”
“Now I know where he gets it,” Vic 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 clear 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 hung-over) 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 hay-cutting 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