It

— he was almost sure it did. And for a moment hadn’t he felt some give in the door against which he was now cringing?
But he wasn’t cringing anymore. He was standing up straight in the darkness. When had that happened? No time to wonder. Stan licked his dry lips and began to chant: ‘Robins! Gray egrets! Loons! Scarlet tanagers! Crackles! Hammerhead woodpeckers! Red-headed woodpeckers! Chickadees! Wrens! Peli — ‘
The door opened with a protesting scream and Stan took a giant step backward into thin misty air. He fell sprawling on the dead grass. He had bent the bird-book nearly in half, and later that night he would see the clear impressions of his fingers sunken into its cover, as if it had been bound in Play-Doh instead of hard pressboard.
He didn’t try to get up but began to dig in with his heels instead, his butt grooving through the slick grass. His lips were pulled back over his teeth. Inside that dim oblong he could see two sets of legs below the diagonal shadowline thrown by the door, which now stood half-open. He could see jeans that had decayed to a purplish-black. Orange threads lay plastered limply against the seams, and water dripped from the cuffs to puddle around shoes that had mostly rotted away, revealing swelled, purple toes within.
Their hands lay limply at their sides, too long, too waxy– white. Depending from each finger was a small orange pompom.
Holding his bent bird-book in front of him, his face wet with drizzle, sweat, and tears, Stan whispered in a husky monotone: ‘Chickenhawks . . . grosbeaks . . . hummingbirds . . . albatrosses . . . kiwis . . . ‘
One of those hands turned over, showing a palm from which endless water had eroded all the lines, leaving something as idiot-smooth as the hand of a department-store dummy.
One finger unrolled . . . then rolled up again. The pompom bounced and dangled, dangled and bounced.
It was beckoning him.
Stan Uris, who would die in a bathtub with crosses slashed into his forearms twenty-seven years later, got to his knees, then to his feet, then ran. He ran across Kansas Street without looking either way for traffic and paused, panting, on the far sidewalk, to look back.
From this angle he couldn’t see the door in the base of the Standpipe; only the Standpipe itself, thick and yet somehow graceful, standing in the murk. ‘They were dead,’ Stan whispered to himself, shocked. He wheeled suddenly and ran for home.
11
The dryer had stopped. So had Stan.
The three others only looked at him for a long moment. His skin was nearly as gray as the April evening of which he had just told them.
‘Wow,’ Ben said at last. He let out his breath in a ragged, whistling sigh.
‘It’s true,’ Stan said in a low voice. ‘I swear to God it is.’
‘I believe .you,’ Beverly said. ‘After what happened at my house, I’d believe anything.’
She got up suddenly, almost knocking over her chair, and went to the dryer. She began to pull out the rags o ne by one, folding them. Her back was turned, but Ben suspected she was crying. He wanted to go to her and lacked the courage.
‘We gotta talk to Bill about this,’ Eddie said. ‘Bill will know what to do.’
‘Do?’ Stan said, turning to look at him. ‘What do you mean, do?
Eddie looked at him, uncomfortable. ‘Well . . . ‘
‘I don’t want to do anything,’ Stan said. He was looking at Eddie with such a hard, fierce stare that Eddie squirmed in his chair. ‘I want to forget about it. That’s all I want to do.’
‘Not that easy,’ Beverly said quietly, turning around. Ben had been right: the hot sunlight slanting in through the Washateria’s dirty windows reflected off bright lines of tears on her cheeks. ‘It’s not just us. I heard Ronnie Grogan. And the little boy I heard first . . . I think maybe it was that little Clements kid. The one who disappeared off his trike.’
‘So what?’ Stan said defiantly.
‘So what if it gets more?’ she asked. ‘What if it gets more kids?’
His eyes, a hot brown, locked with her blue ones, answering the question without speaking: So what if it does?
But Beverly did not look down or away and at last Stan dropped his own eyes . . . perhaps only because she was still crying, but perhaps because her concern somehow made her stronger.
‘Eddie’s right,’ she said. ‘We ought to talk to Bill. Then maybe to the Police Chief — ‘
‘Right,’ Stan said. If he was trying to sound contemptuous, it didn’t work. His voice came out sounding only tired. ‘Dead kids in the Standpipe Blood that only kids can see, not grownups. Clowns walking on the Canal. Balloons that blow against the wind. Mummies. Lepers under