It

of those eggs. They ran giggling and whooping and yelling through the Sunday-silent Ironworks, finding the eggs under the giant tipper-vats, inside the desk drawers of the foreman, balanced between the great rusty teeth of gearwheels, inside the molds on the third floor (in the old photographs these molds look like cupcake tins from some giant’s kitchen). Three generations of Kitcheners were there to watch the gay riot and to award prizes at the end of the hunt, which was to come at four o’clock, whether all the eggs had been found or not. The end actually came forty-five minutes early, at quarter past three. That was when the Ironworks exploded. Seventy-two people were pulled dead from the wreckage before the sun went down. The final toll was a hundred and two. Eighty-eight of the dead were children. On the following Wednesday, while the city still lay in stunned silent contemplation of the tragedy, a woman found the head of nine-year-old Robert Dohay caught in the limbs of her back-yard apple tree. There was chocolate on the Dohay lad’s teeth and blood in his hair. He was the last of the known dead. Eight children and one adult were never accounted for. It was the worst tragedy in Derry’s history, even worse than the fire at the Black Spot in 1930, and it was never explained. All four of the Ironworks’ boilers were shut down. Not just banked; shut down.
But:
The murder rate in Derry is six times the murder rate of any other town of comparable size in New England. I found my tentative conclusions in this matter so difficult to believe that I turned my figures over to one of the high-school hackers, who spends what time he doesn’t spend in front of his Commodore here in the library. He went several steps further — scratch a hacker, find an overachiever — by adding another dozen small cities to what he called ‘the stat-pool’ and presenting me with a computer-generated ba r graph where Derry slicks out like
a sore thumb. ‘People must have wicked short tempers here, Mr Hanlon,’ was his only comment. I didn’t reply. If I had, I might have told him that something in Derry has a wicked short temper, anyway.
Here in Derry children disappear unexplained and unfound at the rate of forty to sixty a year. Most are teenagers. They are assumed to be runaways. I suppose some of them even are.
And during what Albert Carson would undoubtedly have called the time of the cycle, the rate of disappearance shoots nearly out of sight. In the year 1930, for instance — the year the Black Spot burned — there were better than one hundred and seventy child disappearances in Derry — and you must remember that these are only the disappearances which were reported to the police and thus documented. Nothing surprising about it, the current Chief of Police told me when I showed him the statistic. It was the Depression. Most of em probably got tired of eating potato soup or going flat hungry at home and went off riding the rods, looking for something better.
During 1958, a hundred and twenty-seven children, ranging in age from three to nineteen, were reported missing in Derry. Was there a Depression in 1958? I asked Chief Rademacher. No, he said. But people move around a lot, Hanlon. Kids in particular get itchy feet. Have a fight with the folks about coming in late after a date and boom, they’re gone.
I showed Chief Rademacher the picture of Chad Lowe which had appeared in the Derry News i n April 1958. You think this one ran away after a fight with his folks about coming in late, Chief Rademacher? He was three and a half when he dropped out of sight.
Rademacher fixed me with a sour glance and told me it sure had been nice talking with me, but if there was nothing else, he was busy. I left.
Haunted, haunting, haunt.
Often visited by ghosts or spirits, as in the pipes under the sink; to appear or recur often, as every twenty-five, twenty-six, or twenty-seven years; a feeding place for animals, as in the cases of George Denbrough, Adrian Mellon, Betty Ripsom, the Albrecht girl, the Johnson