It

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The bird whirled around again, meaning to pick him up with its talons and carry him away like a hawk with a fieldmouse. Meaning to carry him back to its nest. Meaning to eat him.
As it flew at him, swooping down, its black, horribly alive eyes fixed on him, Mike cut sharply right. The bird missed him-barely. The dusty smell of its wings was overpowering, unbearable.
Now he was running parallel to the fallen smokestack, its tiles blurring by. He could see where it ended. If he could reach the end and buttonhook to the left, get inside, he might be safe. He thought the bird was too big to squeeze inside. He came very close to not making it. The bird flew at him again, pulling up as it closed in, its wings flapping and pushing air in a hurricane, its scaly talons now angled toward him and descending. It screamed again, and this time Mike thought he heard triumph in its voice.
He lowered his head, put his arm up, and rammed straight forward. The talons closed and for a moment the bird had him by the forearm. The grip was like the clutch of incredibly strong fingers tipped with tough nails. They bit like teeth. The bird's flapping wings were a thunder in his ears; he was dimly aware of feathers falling around him, some brushing past his cheeks like phantom kisses. The bird rose then, and for just a moment Mike felt himself pulled upward, first straight, then on tiptoe... and for one freezing second he felt the toes of his Keds lose contact with the earth.
"Let me GO!" he screamed at it, and twisted his arm. For a moment the talons held on, and then the sleeve of his shirt ripped. He thumped back down. The bird squalled. Mike ran again, brushing through the thing's tailfeathers, gagging at that dry smell. It was like running through a shower-curtain of feathers.
Still coughing, eyes stinging from both tears and whatever vile dust coated the bird's feathers, he stumbled into the fallen smokestack. There was no thought now of what might be lurking inside. He ran into the darkness, his gasping sobs taking on a flat echo. He went back perhaps twenty feet and then turned toward the bright circle of daylight. His chest was rising and falling in quick jerks. He was suddenly aware that, if he had misjudged either the size of the bird or the size of the smokestack's muzzle, he had killed himself as surely as if he had put his father's shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. There was no way out. This wasn't just a pipe; it was a blind alley. The other end of the stack was buried in the earth.
The bird squalled again, and suddenly the light at the end of the smokestack was blotted out as it lighted on the ground outside. He could see its yellow scaly legs, each as thick as a man's cab's. Then it cocked its head down and looked inside. Mike found himself again staring into those hideously bright fresh-tar eyes with their gold wedding-rings of iris. The bird's beak opened and closed, opened and closed, and each time it snapped shut he heard an audible click, like the sound you hear in your own ears when you snap your teeth together hard. Sharp, he thought. Its beak is sharp. I guess I knew birds had sharp beaks, but I never really thought about it until now.
It squawked again. The sound was so loud in the tile throat of the stack that Mike clapped his hands to his ears.
The bird began to force itself into the mouth of the stack.
"No!" Mike cried. "No, you can't!"
The light faded as more of the bird's body pressed its way into the stack's bore (Oh my Lord, why didn't I remember it was mostly feathers? Why didn't I remember it could squeeze?). The light faded... faded... was gone. Now there was only an inky blackness, the suffocating attic-smell of the bird, and the rustling sound of its feathers.
Mike fell on his knees and began to grope on the curved floor of the smokestack, his hands spread wide, feeling. He found a piece of broken tile, its sharp edges furred with what felt like moss. He cocked his arm back and pegged it. There was a thump. The bird uttered its buzzing, chirruping sound again.
"Get out of here!" Mike screamed.
There was silence... and then that crackly, rustling sound began again as the bird resumed forcing itself into the pipe. Mike felt along the floor, found other pieces of tile, and began to throw one after another. They thumped and thudded off the bird and then clinked to the tile sleeve of the smokestack.
Please, God, Mike thought incoherently. Please God, phase God, please God -
It came to him that he ought to retreat down the smokestack's bore. He had run in through, what had been the stack's base; it stood to reason that it would narrow as he backed up. He could retreat, yes, and listen to that low dusty rustle as the bird worked its way in after him. He could retreat, and if he was lucky he might get beyond the point where the bird could continue to advance.
But what if the bird got stuck?
If that happened, he and the bird would die in here together. They would die in here together and rot in here together. In the dark.
"Please, God!" he screamed, and was totally unaware that he had cried out aloud. He threw another piece of tile, and this time his throw was more powerful-he felt, he told the others much later, as if someone were behind him at that moment, and that someone had given his arm a tremendous push. This time there was no feathery thud; instead there was a splatting sound, the sound a kid's hand might make slapping into the surface of a bowl of half-solidified Jell-O. This time the bird screamed not in anger but in real pain. The tenebrous whirr of its wings filled the smokestack; stinking air streamed past Mike in a hurricane, flapping his clothes, making him cough and gag and retreat as dust and moss flew.
Light appeared again, gray and weak at first, then brightening and shifting as the bird retreated from the stack's muzzle. Mike burst into tears, fell to his knees again, and began grubbing madly for more pieces of tile. Without any conscious thought, he ran forward with both hands full of tiling (in this light he could see the pieces were splotched with blue-gray moss and lichen, like the surface of slate gravestones), until he was nearly at the mouth of the stack. He intended to keep the bird from coming back in if he could.
It bent down, cocking its head the way a trained bird on a perch will sometimes cock its head, and Mike saw where his last shot had struck home. The bird's right eye was nearly gone. Instead of that glittering bubble of fresh tar, there was a crater filled with blood. Whitish-gray goo dripped from the corner of the socket and trickled along the side of the bird's beak. Tiny parasites wriggled and squirmed in this pussy discharge.
It saw him and lunged forward. Mike began to throw chunks of tile at it. They struck its head and beak. It withdrew for a moment and then lunged again, beak opening, revealing that pink lining again, revealing something else that caused Mike to freeze for a moment, his own mouth dropping open. The bird's tongue was silver, its surface as crazy-cracked as the surface of a volcanic land which has first baked and then slagged off.
And on this tongue, like weird tumbleweeds that had taken temporary root there, were a number of orange puffs.
Mike threw the last of his tiles directly into that gaping maw and the bird withdrew again, screaming its frustration, rage, and pain. For a moment Mike could see its reptilian talons... Then its wings ruffled the air and it was gone.
A moment later he lifted his face-a face that was gray-brown under the dirt, dust, and bits of moss that the bird's wind-machine wings had blown at him-toward the clicking sound of its talons on the tile. The only clean places on Mike's face were the tracks that had been washed clean by his tears.
The bird walked back and forth overhead: Tak-tak-tak-tak.
Mike retreated a bit, gathered up more chunks of tile, and heaped them as close to the mouth of the stack as he dared. If the thing came back, he wanted to be able to fire at it from point-blank range. The light outside was still bright-now that it was May, it wouldn't get dark for a long time yet-but suppose the bird just decided to wait?
Mike swallowed, the dry sides of his throat rubbing together for a moment.
Overhead: Tak-tak-tak.
He had a fine pile of ammunition now. In the dim light, here beyond the place where the angle of the sun made a shadow-spiral inside the pipe, it looked like a pile of broken crockery swept together by a housewife. Mike rubbed the palms of his dirty hands along the sides of his jeans and waited to see what would happen next.
A space of time passed before something did-whether five minutes or twenty-five, he could not tell. He was only aware of the bird walking back and forth overhead like an insomniac pacing the floor at three in the morning.
Then its wings fluttered again. It landed in front of the smokestack's opening. Mike, on his knees just behind his pile of tiling, began to peg missiles at it before it could even bend its head down. One of them slammed into a plated yellow leg and drew a trickle of blood so dark it seemed almost as black as the bird's eyes. Mike screamed in triumph, the sound thin and almost lost under the bird's own enraged squawk.
"Get out of here!" Mike cried. "I'm going to keep hitting you until you get out of here, I swear to God I will!"
The bird flew up to the top of the smokestack and resumed its pacing.
Mike waited.
Finally its wings ruffled again as it took off. Mike waited, expecting the yellow feet, so like hen's feet, to appear again. They didn't. He waited longer, convinced it had to be some kind of a trick, realizing at last that that wasn't why he was waiting at all. He was waiting because he was scared to go out, scared to leave the safety of this bolthole.
Never mind! Never mind stuff like that! I'm not a rabbit!
He took as many chunks of tile as he could handle comfortably, then put some more inside his shirt. He stepped out of the smokestack, trying to look everywhere at once and wishing madly for eyes in the back of his head. He saw only the field stretching ahead and around him, littered with the exploded rusting remains of the Kitchener Ironworks. He wheeled around, sure he would see the bird perched on the lip of the stack like a vulture, a one-eyed vulture now, only wanting the boy to see him before it attacked for the final time, using that sharp beak to jab and rip and strip.
But the bird was not there.
It was really gone.
Mike's nerve snapped.
He uttered a breaking scream of fear and ran for the weather-beaten fence between the field and the road, dropping the last pieces of tile from his hands. Most of the others fell out of his shirt as the shirt pulled free of his belt. He vaulted over the fence one-handed, like Roy Rogers showing off for Dale Evans on his way back from the corral with Pat Brady and the rest of the buckaroos. He grabbed the handlebars of his bike and ran beside it forty feet up the road before getting on. Then he pedaled madly, not daring to look back, not daring to slow down, until he reached the intersection of Pasture Road and Outer Main Street, where there were lots of cars passing back and forth.
When he got home, his father was changing the plugs on the tractor. Will observed that Mike looked powerful musty and dusty. Mike hesitated for just a split second and then told his father that he'd taken a tumble from his bike on the way home, swerving to avoid a pothole.
"Did you break anything, Mikey?" Will asked, observing his son a little more carefully.
"No, sir."
"Sprains?"
"Huh-uh."
"Sure?" * Mike nodded.
"Did you pick yourself up a souvenir?"
Mike reached into his pocket and found the gear-wheel. He showed it to his father, who looked at it briefly and then plucked a tiny crumb of tiling from the pad of flesh just below Mike's thumb. He seemed more interested in this.
"From that old smokestack?" Will asked.
Mike nodded.
"You go inside there?"
Mike nodded again.
"See anything in there?" Will asked, and then, as if to make a joke of the question (which hadn't sounded like a joke at all), he added: "Buried treasure?"
Smiling a little, Mike shook his head.
"Well, don't tell your mother you was muckin about in there," Will said.
"She'd shoot me first and you second." He looked even more closely at his son.
"Mikey, are you all right?"
"Huh?"
"You look a little peaky around the eyes."
"I guess I might be a little tired," Mike said. "It's eight or ten miles there and back again, don't forget. You want some help with the tractor, Daddy?"
"No, I'm about done screwing it up for this week. You go on in and wash up."
Mike started away, and then his father called to him once more. Mike looked back.
"I don't want you going around that place again," he said, "at least not until all this trouble is cleared up and they catch the man who's doing it... you didn't see anybody out there, did you? No one chased you, or hollered you down?"
"I didn't see any people at all," Mike said.
Will nodded and lit a cigarette. "I think I was wrong to send you there. Old
places like that... sometimes they can be dangerous."
Their eyes locked briefly.
"Okay, Daddy," Mike said. "I don't want to go back anyway. It was a little spooky."
Will nodded again. "Less said the better, I reckon. You go and get cleaned
up now. And tell her to put on three or four extra sausages."
Mike did.
6
Never mind that now, Mike Hanlon thought, looking at the grooves which went up to the concrete edge of the Canal and stopped there. Never mind that, it might just have been a dream anyhow, and -
There were splotches of dried blood on the lip of the Canal.
Mike looked at these, and then he looked down into the Canal. Black water flowed smoothly past. Runners of dirty yellow foam clung to the Canal's sides, sometimes breaking free to flow downstream in lazy loops and curves. For a moment-just a moment-two clots of this foam came together and seemed to form a face, a kid's face, its eyes turned up in an avatar of terror and agony.
Mike's breath caught, as if on a thorn.
The foam broke apart, became meaningless again, and at that moment there was a loud splash on his right. Mike snapped his head around, shrinking back a little, and for a moment he believed he saw something in the shadows of the outflow tunnel where the Canal resurfaced after its course under downtown.
Then it was gone.
Suddenly, cold and shuddering, he dug in his pocket for the knife he had found in the grass. He threw it into the Canal. There was a small splash, a ripple that began as a circle and was then tugged into the shape of an arrowhead by the current... then nothing.
Nothing except the fear that was suddenly suffocating him and the deadly certainty that there was something near, something watching him, gauging its chances, biding its time.
He turned, meaning to walk back to his bike-to run would be to dignify those fears and undignify himself-and then that splashing sound came again. It was a lot louder this second time. So much for dignity. Suddenly he was running as fast as he could, beating his buns for the gate and his bike, jamming the kickstand up with one heel and pedaling for the street as fast as he could. That sea-smell was all at once too thick... much too thick. It was everywhere. And the water dripping from the wet branches of the trees seemed much too loud.