It

the field stretching ahead and around him, littered with the exploded rusting remains of the Kitchener Ironworks. He wheeled around, sure he would see the bird perched on the lip of the stack like a vulture, a one-eyed vulture now, only wanting the boy to see him before it attacked for the final time, using that sharp beak to jab and rip and strip.
But the bird was not there.
It was really gone.
Mike’s nerve snapped.
He uttered a breaking scream of fear and ran for the weather-beaten fence between the field and the road, dropping the last pieces of tile from his hands. Most of the others fell out of his shirt as the shirt pulled free of his belt. He vaulted over the fence one –handed, like Roy Rogers showing off for Dale Evans on his way back from the corral with Pat Brady and the rest of the buckaroos. He grabbed the handlebars of his bike and ran beside it forty feet up the
road before getting on. Then he pedaled madly, not daring to look back, not daring to slow down, until he reached the intersection of Pasture Road and Outer Main Street, where there were lots of cars passing back and forth.
When he got home, his father was changing the plugs on the tractor. Will observed that Mike looked powerful musty and dusty. Mike hesitated for just a split second and then told his father that he’d taken a tumble from his bike on the way home, swerving to avoid a pothole.
‘Did you break anything, Mikey?’ Will asked, observing his son a little more carefully.
‘No, sir.’
‘Sprains?’
‘Huh-uh.’
‘Sure?’ * Mike nodded.
‘Did you pick yourself up a souvenir?’
Mike reached into his pocket and found the gear-wheel. He showed it to his father, who looked at it briefly and then plucked a tiny crumb of tiling from the pad of flesh just below Mike’s thumb. He seemed more interested in this.
‘From that old smokestack?’ Will asked.
Mike nodded.
‘You go inside there?’
Mike nodded again.
‘See anything in there?’ Will asked, and then, as if to make a joke of the question (which hadn’t sounded like a joke at all), he added: ‘Buried treasure?’
Smiling a little, Mike shook his head.
‘Well, don’t tell your mother you was muckin about in there,’ Will said. ‘She’d shoot me first and you second.’ He looked even more closely at his son. ‘Mikey, are you all right?’
‘Huh?’
‘You look a little peaky around the eyes.’
‘I guess I might be a little tired,’ Mike said. ‘It’s eight or ten miles there and back again, don’t forget. You want some help with the tractor, Daddy?’
‘No, I’m about done screwing it up for this week. You go on in and wash up.’
Mike started away, and then his father called to him once more. Mike looked back.
‘I don’t want you going around that place again,’ he said, ‘at least not until all this trouble is cleared up and they catch the man who’s doing it . . . you didn’t see anybody out there, did you? No one chased you, or hollered you down?’
‘I didn’t see any people at all,’ Mike said.
Will nodded and lit a cigarette. ‘I think I was wrong to send you there. Old places like that . . . sometimes they can be dangerous.’
Their eyes locked briefly.
‘Okay, Daddy,’ Mike said. ‘I don’t want to go back anyway. It was a little spooky.’
Will nodded again. ‘Less said the better, I reckon. You go and get cleaned up now. And tell her to put on three or four extra sausages.’
Mike did.
6
Never mind that now, Mike Hanlon thought, looking at the grooves which went up to the concrete edge of the Canal and stopped there. Never mind that, it might just have been a dream anyhow, and —
There were splotches of dried blood on the lip of the Canal.
Mike looked at these, and then he looked down into the Canal. Black water flowed smoothly past. Runners of dirty yellow foam clung to the Canal’s sides, sometimes breaking free to flow downstream in lazy loops and curves. For a moment — just a moment — two clots of this foam came together and seemed to form a face, a kid’s face, its eyes turned up in an avatar of terror and agony.
Mike’s breath caught, as if on a thorn.
The foam broke apart, became meaningless again, and at that moment there was a loud splash on his right. Mike snapped his head around, shrinking back a little, and for a moment he believed he saw something in the shadows of the outflow tunnel where the Canal resurfaced after its course under downtown.
Then it was gone.
Suddenly, cold and shuddering, he dug in his pocket for the knife he had found in the grass. He threw it into the Canal. There was a small splash, a ripple that began as a circle and was then tugged into the shape of an arrowhead