thuds, and he felt sure it would soon burst in terror. He couldn't run but when he got out of the willows he did manage a limping jogtrot.

He fixed his eyes on the streetlight that marked the park's main gate. He headed in that direction, managing a little more speed, thinking: I'll make it to the light, and that's all right.I'll make it to the light, and that's all right. Bright light, no more fright, up all night, what a sight —

Something was following him.

Eddie could hear it bludgeoning its way through the willow grove. If he turned he would see it. It was gaining. He could hear its feet, a kind of shuffling, squelching stride, but he would not look back, no, he would look ahead at the light, the light was all right, he would just continue his flight to the light, and he was almost there, almost —

The smell was what made him look back. The overwhelming smell, as if fish had been left to rot in a huge pile that had become carrion-slushy in the summer heat. It was the smell of a dead ocean.

It wasn't Dorsey after him now; it was the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The thing's snout was long and pleated. Green fluid dripped from black gashes like vertical mouths in its cheeks. Its eyes were white and jellylike. Its webbed fingers were tipped with claws like razors. Its respiration was bubbly and deep, the sound of a diver with a bad regulator. As it saw Eddie looking, its green-black lips wrinkled back from huge fangs in a dead and vacant smile.

It shambled after him, dripping, and Eddie suddenly understood. It meant to take him back to the Canal, to carry him down into the dank blackness of the Canal's underground passage. To eat him there.

Eddie put on a burst of speed. The arc-sodium light at the gate drew closer. He could see its halo of bugs and moths. A truck went by, headed for Route 2, the driver working his way up through the gears, and it crossed Eddie's desperate, terrified mind that he could be drinking coffee from a paper cup and listening to a Buddy Holly tune on the radio, completely unaware that less than two hundred yards away there was a boy who might be dead in another twenty seconds.

The stink. The overwhelming stink of it. Gaining. All around him.

It was a park bench he tripped over. Some kids had casually pushed it over earlier that evening, heading toward their homes at a run to beat the curfew. Its seat poked an inch or two out of the grass, one shade of green on another, almost invisible in the moon-driven dark. The edge of the seat smacked Eddie in the shins, causing a burst of glassy, exquisite pain. His legs flipped out behind him and he thumped into the grass.

He looked behind him and saw the Creature bearing down, its white poached-egg eyes glittering, its scales dripping slime the color of seaweed, the gills up and down its bulging neck and cheeks opening and closing.

He crawled now, fingers hooking deep into the turf. His tongue hung out.

In the second before the Creature's fish-smelling horny hands closed around his throat, a comforting thought came to him: This is a dream; it has to be. There's no real Creature, no real Black Lagoon, and even if there was, that was in South America or the Florida Everglades or someplace like that. This is only a dream and I'll wake up in my bed or maybe in the leaves under the bandstand and I —

Then batrachian hands closed around his neck and Eddie's hoarse cries were choked off; as the Creature turned him over, the chitinous hooks which sprouted from those hands scrawled bleeding marks like calligraphy into his neck. He stared into its glowing white eyes. He felt the webs between its fingers pressing against his throat like constricting bands of living seaweed. His terror-sharpened gaze noted the fin, something like a rooster's comb and

something like a hornpout's poisonous backfin, standing atop the Creature's hunched and plated head. As its hands clamped tight, shutting off his air, he was even able to see the way the white light from the arc-sodium lamp turned a smoky green as it passed through that membranous headfin.

'You're . . . not . . . real,' Eddie choked, but clouds of grayness were closing in now, and he realized faintly that it was real enough, this Creature. It was, after all, killing him.

And yet some rationality remained, even until the end: as the Creature hooked its claws into the soft meat of his neck, as his carotid artery let go in a warm and painless gout that splashed the thing's reptilian plating, Eddie's hands groped at the Creature's back, feeling for a zipper. They fell away only when the Creature tore his head from his shoulders with a low satisfied grunt.

And as Eddie's picture of what It was began to fade, It began promptly to change into something else.

4

Unable to sleep, plagued by bad dreams, a boy named Michael Hanlon rose soon after first light on the first full day of summer vacation. The light was pale, bundled up in a low, thick mist that would lift by eight o'clock, taking the wraps off a perfect summer day.

But that was for later. For now the world was all gray and rose, as silent as a cat walking on a carpet.

Mike, dressed in corduroys, a tee-shirt, and black high-topped Keds, came downstairs, ate a bowl of Wheaties (he didn't really like Wheaties but had wanted the free prize in the box — a Captain Midnight Magic Decoder Ring), then hopped on his bike and pedaled toward town, riding on the sid ewalks because of the fog. The fog changed everything, made the most ordinary things like fire hydrants and stop-signs into objects of mystery — things both strange and a trifle sinister. You could hear cars but not see them, and because of the fog's odd acoustic quality, you could not tell if they were far or near until you actually saw them come rolling out of the fog with ghost –halos of moisture ringing their headlamps.

He turned right on Jackson Street, bypassing downtown, and then crossed to Main Street by way of Palmer Lane — and during his short ride down this little byway's one-block length he passed the house where he would live as an adult. He did not look at it; it was just a small two-story dwelling with a garage and a small lawn. It gave off no special vibration to the passing boy who would spend most of his adult life as its owner and only dweller.

At Main Street he turned right and rode up to Bassey Park, still wandering, simply riding and enjoying the stillness of the early day. Once ni side the main gate he dismounted his bike, pushed down the kickstand, and walked toward the Canal. He was still, as far as he knew, impelled by nothing more than purest whim. Certainly it did not occur to him to think that his dreams of the night before ha d anything to do with his current course; he did not even remember exactly what his dreams had been — only that one had followed another until he had awakened at five o'clock, sweaty but shivering, and with the idea that he ought to eat a fast breakfast and then take a bike-ride into town.

Here in Bassey there was a smell in the fog he didn't like: a sea-smell, salty and old. He had smelled it before, of course. In the early –morning fogs you could often smell the ocean in Derry, although the coast was forty miles away. But the smell this morning seemed thicker, more vital. Almost dangerous.

Something caught his eye. He bent down and picked up a cheap two-blade pocket knife. Someone had scratched the initials EC on the side. Mike looked at it thoughtfully for a moment or two and then pocketed it. Finders keepers, losers weepers.

He glanced around. Here, near where he had found the knife, was an overturned park bench. He righted it, setting its iron footings back into the holes they had made over a period of months or years. Beyond the bench he saw a matted place in the grass . . . and leading away from it, two grooves. The grass was springing back up, but those grooves were still fairly clear. They went in the direction of the Canal. ; And there wa s blood.