'Down he went, just like a steer hit with a poleaxe. Trev run to the truck, fired it up, and drove it around so it was facin the front of the Black Spot, but to the left of the door. He th'owed it into first, popped the clutch on that cocksucker, and here he come!

'"Look out there!" I shouted at that crowd of people standing around. 'Ware that truck!"

'They scattered like quail, and for a wonder Trev didn't hit none of em. He hit the side of the building going maybe thirty, and cracked his face a good one on the steerin wheel of the truck. I seen the blood fly from his nose when he shook his head to clear it. He punched out reverse, backed up fifty yards, and come down on her again. WHAM! The Black Spot wasn't nothing but corrugated tin, and that second hit did her. The whole side of that oven fell in and the flames come roarin out. How anything could have still been alive in there I don't know, but there was. People are a lot tougher than you'd believe, Mikey, and if you don't believe it, just take a look at me, slidin off the skin of the world by my fingernails. That place was like a smelting furnace, it was a hell of flames and smoke, but people came running out in a regular torrent. There were so many that Trev didn't even dare back the truck up again for fear he would run over some of them. So he got out and ran back to me, leaving it where it was.

'We stood there, watching it end. It hadn't been five minutes all told, but xxxit felt like forever. The last dozen or so that made it out were on fire. People grabbed em and started to roll em around on the ground, trying to put em out. Looking in, we could see other people trying to come, and we knew they wasn't never going to make it.

Trev grabbed my hand and I grabbed him back twice as hard. We stood there holding hands just like you and me are doing now, Mikey, him with his nose broke and blood running down his face and his eyes puffing shut, and we watched them people. They were the real ghosts we saw that night, nothing but shimmers shaped like men and women in that fire, walking toward the opening Trev had bashed with Sergeant Wilson's truck. Some of em had their arms held out, like they expected someone to save them. The others just walked, but they didn't seem to get nowhere. Their clo'es were blazin. Their faces were runnin. And one after another they just toppled over and you didn't see them no more.

'The last one was a woman. Her dress had burned off her and there she was in her slip. Sh e was burnin like a candle. She seemed to look right at me at the end, and I seen her eyelids was on fire.

'When she fell down it was over. The whole place went up in a pillar of fire. By the time the base firetrucks and two more from the Main Street fire station got there, it was already burning itself out. That was the fire at the Black Spot, Mikey.'

He drank the last of his water and handed me the glass to fill at the drinking fountain in the hall. 'Goan piss the bed tonight I guess, Mikey.'

I kissed his cheek and then went out into the hall to fill his glass. When I returned, he was drifting away again, his eyes glassy and contemplative. When I put the glass on the nighttable, he mumbled a thank-you I could barely understand. I looked at the Westclox on his table and saw it was almost eight. Time for me to go home.

I leaned over to kiss him goodbye . . . and instead heard myself whisper, 'What did you see?'

His eyes, which were now slipping shut, barely turned toward the sound of my voice. He might have known it was me, or he might have believed he was hearing the voice of his own thoughts. 'Hunk?'

'The thing you saw,' I whispered. I didn't want to hear, but I had to hear. I was both hot and cold, my eyes burning, my hands freezing. But I had to hear. As I suppose Lot's wife had to turn back and look at the destruction of Sodom.

'Twas a bird,' he said. 'Right over the last of those runnin men. A hawk, maybe. What they call a kestrel. But it was big. Never told no one. Would have been locked up. That bird was maybe sixty feet from wingtip to wingtip. It was the size of a Japanese Zero. But I seen . . . seen its eyes . . . and I think . . . it seen me . . . '

His head slipped over to the side, toward the window, where the dark was coming.

'It swooped down and grabbed that last man up. Got him right by the sheet, it did xxxand I heard that bird's wings . . . The sound was like fire . . . and it hovered . . . and I thought, Birds can't hover . . . but this one could, because . because . . . '

He fell silent.

'Why, Daddy?' I whispered. 'Why could it hover?'

'It didn't hover,' he said.

I sat there in silence, thinking he had gone to sleep for sure this time. I had never been so afraid in my life . . . because four years before, I had seen that bird. Somehow, in some unimaginable way, I had nearly forgotten that nightmare. It was my father who brought it back.

'It didn't hover,' he said. 'It floated. It floated. There were big bunches of balloons tied to each wing, and it floated.'

My father went to sleep.

March 1st, 1985

It's come again. I know that now. I'll wait, but in my heart I know it. I'm not sure I can stand it. As a kid I was able to deal with it, but it's different with kids. In some fundamental way it's different.

I wrote all of that last night in a kind of frenzy — not that I could have gone home anyway. Derry has been blanketed in a thick glaze of ice, and although the sun is out this morning, nothing is moving.

I wrote until long after three this morning, pushing the pen faster and faster, trying to get it all out. I had forgotten about seeing the giant bird when I was eleven. It was my father's story that brought it back . . . and I never forgot it again. Not any of it. In a way, I suppose it was his final gift to me. A terrible gift, you would say, but wonderful in its way.

I slept right where I was, my head in my arms, my notebook and pen on the table in front of me. I woke up this morning with a numb ass and an aching back, but feeling free, somehow . . . purged of that old story.

And then I saw that I had had company in the night, as I slept.

The tracks, drying to faint muddy impressions, led from the front door of the library (which I locked; I always lock it) to the desk where I slept.

There were no tracks leading away.

Whatever it was, it came to me in the night, left its talisman . . . and then simply disappeared.

Tied to my reading lamp was a single balloon. Filled with helium, it floated in a morning sunray which slanted in through one of the high windows.

On it was a picture of my face, the eyes gone, blood running down from the ragged sockets, a scream distorting the mouth on the balloon's thin and bulging rubber skin.

I looked at it and I screamed. The scream echoed through the library, echoing back, vibrating from the circular iron staircase leading to the stacks.

The balloon burst with a bang.