It’s just small-town life, though@all it Peyton Place or Grover’s Corners or Castle Rock, it’s just folks eatin pie and drinkin coffee and talkin about each other behind their hands. There’s Slopey Dodd, all by his lonesome because the other kids make fun of his stutter. There’s Myrtle Keeton, and if she looks a little lonely and bewildered, as if she’s not really sure where she is or what’s goin on, it’s because her husband (fella you just saw comin up the courthouse steps behind Eddie) hasn’t seemed himself for the last six months or so. See how puffy her eyes are? I think she’s been cryin, or not sleepin well, or both, don’t you?

And there goes Lenore Potter, lookin like she just stepped out of a bandbox. Going to the Western Auto, no doubt, to see if her special organic fertilizer came in yet. That woman has got more kinds of flowers growin around her house than Carter has liver pills.

Awful proud of em, she is. She ain’t a great favorite with the ladies of this town-they think she’s snooty, with her flowers and her mood-beads and her seventy-dollar Boston perms. They think she’s snooty, and I’ll tell you a secret, since we’re just sittin here side by side on this splintery bandstand step. I think they’re right.

All ordinary enough, I guess you’d say, but not all our troubles in Castle Rock are ordinary; I got to set you straight on that. No one has forgotten Frank Dodd, the crossing guard who went crazy here twelve years ago and killed those women, and they haven’t forgotten the dog, either, the one that came down with rabies and killed Joe Camber and the old rummy down the road from him.

The dog killed good old Sheriff George Bannerman, too. Alan Pangborn is doing that job these days, and he’s a good man, but he won’t never stack up to Big George in the eyes of the town.

Wasn’t nothing ordinary about what happened to Reginald “Pop” Merrill, either-Pop was the old miser who used to run the town junk shop.