It

weren’t people who bucked the odds successfully, I guess everybody would give up. If it was just one or two of you, we could pass it off as coincidence. But it’s not just one or two; it’s all of you, and that inclu des Stan Uris, who was the most successful young accountant in Atlanta . . . which means in the whole South. My conclusion is that your success stems from what happened here twenty-seven years ago. If you had all been exposed to asbestos at that time and ha d all developed lung cancer by now, the correlative would be no less clear or persuasive. Do any of you want to dispute it?’
He looked at them. No one answered.
‘All except you,’ Bill said. ‘What happened to you, Mikey?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ He grinned. ‘I stayed here.’
‘You kept the lighthouse,’ Ben said. Bill jerked around and looked at him, startled, but Ben was staring hard at Mike and didn’t see. ‘That doesn’t make me feel so good, Mike. In fact, it makes me feel sort of like a bugturd.’
‘Amen,’ Beverly said.
Mike shook his head patiently. ‘You have nothing to feel guilty about, any of you. Do. you think it was my choice to stay here, any more than it was your choice — a n y o f y o u — to leave? Hell, we were kids. For one reason or another your parents moved away, and you guys were part of the baggage they took along. My parents stayed. And was it really their decision — any of them) I don’t think so. How was it decided who would go and who would stay? Was it luck? Fate? It? Some Other? I don’t know. But it wasn’t us guys. So quit it.’
‘You’re not . . . not bitter?’ Eddie asked timidly.
‘I’ve been too busy to be bitter,’ Mike said. ‘I’ve spent a long time watching and waiting . . . I was watching and waiting even before I knew it, I think, but for the last five years or so I’ve been on what you might call red alert. Since the turn of the year I’ve been keeping a journal.
And when a man writes, he thinks harder . . . or maybe just more specifically. And one of the things I’ve spent time writing and thinking about is the nature of It. It changes; we know that. I think It also manipulates, and leaves Its marks on people just by the nature of what It is — the way you can smell a skunk on you even after a long bath, if it lets go its bag of scent too near you. The way a grasshopper will spit bug juice into your palm if you catch it in your hand.’
Mike slowly unbuttoned his shirt and spread it wide. They could all see the pinkish scrawls of scar across the smooth brown skin of his chest between the nipples.
‘The way claws leave scars,’ he said.
‘The werewolf,’ Richie almost moaned. ‘Oh Christ, Big Bill, the werewolf! When we went back to Neibolt Street!’
‘What?’ Bill asked. He sounded like a man called out of a dream. ‘What, Richie?’
‘Don’t you remember?
‘No . . . do you?’
‘I . . . I almost do . . . ‘ Looking both confused and scared, Richie subsided.
‘Are you saying this thing isn’t evil?’ Eddie asked Mike abruptly. He was staring at the scars as if hypno tized. ‘That it’s just some part of the . . . the natural order?’
‘It’s no part of a natural order we understand or condone,’ Mike said, rebuttoning his shirt, ‘and I see no reason to operate on any other basis than the one we do understand: that It kills, kills children, and that’s wrong. Bill understood that before any of us. Do you remember, Bill?’
‘I remember that I wanted to kill It,’ Bill said, and for the first time (and ever after) he heard the pronoun gain proper-noun status in his own voic e. ‘But I didn’t have much of a world –view on the subject, if you see what I mean — I just wanted to kill It because It killed George.’
‘And do you still?’
Bill considered this carefully. He looked down at his spread hands on the table and remembered George in his yellow slicker, his hood up, the paper boat with its thin glaze of paraffin in one hand. He looked up at Mike.
‘M-M-More than ever,’ he said.
Mike nodded as if this were exactly what he had expected. ‘It left Its mark on us. It worked Its will on us, just as It has worked Its will on this whole town, day in and day out, even during those long periods when It is asleep or hibernating or whatever It does between Its more . . . more lively periods.’
Mike raised one finger.
‘But if It worked Its will on us, at some point, in some way, we aho worked our will on It. We stopped It before It was done — I know we did. Did we weaken It? Hurt It? Did we, in fact, almost kill It? I think we did. I think we came so close to killing It that we went away thinking we had.’
‘But you don’t remember that part either, do you?’ Ben asked.
‘No. I can remember everything up until August 15th 1958 with almost perfect clarity. But from then until September