It

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 explo re 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 wa s 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 fathe r’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 dete rmined 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