Darkness Under the Sun

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A week before his eleventh birthday, when Howie Dugley climbed to the roof of the former Boswell’s Emporium to watch normal people doing all kinds of ordinary things along Maple Street, he saw the monster for the first time.

Howie’s family lived only two blocks from the building in which Boswell’s had formerly done business. He could get there by crossing the cemetery beside St. Anthony’s Church and then following a cobbled alleyway that seldom had traffic. Huge scarlet oaks, glossy green now in mid-June, shaded the graveyard. Howie liked the trees. They lived longer than people, and they seemed wise to him, wiser than people would ever be, because they had seen so much and they had nothing to do but think about what they had seen and then grow ever bigger. He wished he could just sit under them for a while or even climb them, climb up into the quiet wisdom of the trees. But that was too risky. That would be asking to have his butt kicked. He got plenty of butt-kicking without asking for it.

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