He’d copped a quick break from working with his father on a kitchen remodel down Main Street. Mrs. Larson wanted new countertops, cabinet doors, new floors, new paint. She called it freshening things up, and Fox called it a way to earn enough money to take Allyson Brendon out for pizza and the movies on Saturday night. He hoped to use that gateway to talk her into the backseat of his ancient VW Bug.

He didn’t mind working with his dad. He hoped to hell he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life swinging a hammer or running a power saw, but he didn’t mind it. His father’s company was always easy, and the job got Fox out of gardening and animal duty on their little farm. It also provided easy access to Cokes and Slim Jims-two items that would never, never be found in the O’Dell-Barry household.

His mother ruled there.

So he heard about the dog from Susan Keefaffer, who rang up his purchases while a few people with nothing better to do on a June afternoon sat at the counter over coffee and gossip.

He didn’t know Marcell, but Fox had a soft spot for animals, so he suffered a twist of grief for the unfortunate poodle. That was leavened somewhat by the idea of Mr. Bestler, whom he did know, standing “naked as a jaybird,” in Susan Keefaffer’s words, beside his backyard pool.

While it made Fox sad to imagine some poor dog drowning in a swimming pool, he didn’t connect it-not then-to the nightmare he and his two closest friends had lived through seven years before.

He’d had a dream the night before, a dream of blood and fire, of voices chanting in a language he didn’t understand. But then he’d watched a double feature of videos- Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre-with his friends Cal and Gage.

He didn’t connect a dead French poodle with the dream, or with what had burned through Hawkins Hollow for a week after his tenth birthday. After the night he and Cal and Gage had spent at the Pagan Stone in Hawkins Wood-and everything had changed for them, and for the Hollow.