It

Once he had discovered a run-over cat that was dying in the gutter on Lower Main Street and sat watching it until an old woman saw him pushing the squashed and mewing thing around with his foot. She whacked him with the broom she had been using to sweep her walk. Go on home! she had shouted at him. What are you, crazy? Patrick had gone on home. He wasn’t mad at the old woman. He had been caught breaking the rules, that was all.
Then, last year (it would not have surprise d Mike Hanlon or any of the others at that point to have known that it was, in fact, on the same day that George Denbrough had been murdered), Patrick had discovered the rusty Amana refrigerator — one of the larger dumpoids in the belt surrounding the dump itself.
Like Bev, he had heard the cautionary warnings about such abandoned appliances, about how thirty –squirty million kids got their stupid selves smoked in them each year. Patrick had stood looking at the refrigerator for a long time, idly playing pocket-pool with himself. That excitement was back, stronger than it had ever been, except for the time he had fixed Avery. The excitement was back because, in the chilly yet fuming wastes that passed for his mind, Patrick Hockstetter had had an idea.
The Luces, who lived three houses down from the Hockstetters, missed their cat, Bobby, a week later. The Luce kids, who couldn’t remember a time when Bobby hadn’t been there, spent hours combing the neighborhood for him. They even pooled their money and pu t an ad in the Derry News Lost and Found column. Nothing came of it. And if any of them had seen Patrick that day, bulkier than ever in his mothball-smelling winter parka (after the floodwaters receded in that fall of ’57, it had come off bitterly cold almost at once), carrying a cardboard carton, they would have thought nothing of it.
The Engstroms, a block over and almost directly behind the Hockstetter home, lost their cocker pup about ten days before Thanksgiving. Other families lost dogs and cats over the next six or eight months, and Patrick of course had taken them all, not to mention a dozen unremarked strays from the Hell’s Half-Acre area of Derry.
He put them into the rusty Amana near the dump, one by one. Each time he brought another animal down, his heart thundering in his chest, his eyes hot and watery with excitement, he would expect to find that Mandy Fazio had pulled the Amana’s latch or popped the hinges with his sledgehammer. But Mandy never touched that particular refrigerator. Perhaps he didn’t realize it was there, perhaps the force of Patrick’s will kept him away . . . or perhaps some other force did that.
The Engstroms’ cocker lasted the longest. In spite of the single-number cold, it was still alive when Patrick came back fo r the third time in as many days, although it had lost all of its original friskiness (it had been wagging its tail and lapping his hands frantically when he originally hauled it out of the box and stuffed it into the refrigerator). When he came back a day after putting it in, the puppy had damn near gotten away. Patrick had to chase it almost
all the way to the dump before he was able to jump it and get hold of one rear leg. The puppy had nipped Patrick with its sharp little teeth. Patrick didn’t mind. In spite of the nips, he had taken the cocker back to the refrigerator and bundled it back in. He had a hard-on when he did it. This was not uncommon.
On the second day the puppy had tried to get out again, but it moved much too slowly. Patrick shoved it back in, slammed the Amana’s rusty door, and leaned against it. He could hear the puppy scratching against the door. He could hear its muffled whines. ‘Good dog,’ said Patrick Hockstetter. His eyes were closed and he was breathing fast. ‘That’s a good dog.’ On the third day the puppy could only roll its eyes toward Patrick’s face when the door opened. Its sides were heaving rapidly and shallowly. When Patrick returned the next day, the cocker was dead with a cake of foam frozen around its mouth and muzzle. This made Patrick think of coconut Popsicles, and he laughed quite hard as he hauled the frozen corpse from his killing-bottle and threw it in the bushes.
The supply of victims (which Patrick thought of, when he thought of them at all, as ‘test animals’) had been thin this summer. Questions of reality aside, his sense of self-preservation was well developed, his intuition exquisite. He suspected he was suspected. By whom he was not sure: Mr Engstrom? Perhaps. Mr Engstrom had turned around and given Patrick a long speculative look in the A&P one day this spring. Mr Engstrom had been buying cigarettes and Patrick had been sent for bread. Mrs Josephs? Maybe. She sat in her parlor window with a telescope